


like history erasing itself

by WhenasInSilks



Category: Iron Man (Comics), Marvel, Marvel 616
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Bondage, Bottom Tony Stark, Community: cap_ironman, D/s, Dark, Explicit Sexual Content, Extremely Dubious Consent, Humiliation, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Pining, Porn, Power Imbalance, Prostitution, Remix, Under-negotiated Kink, brought to the worst possible conclusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-25 13:01:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16661573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenasInSilks/pseuds/WhenasInSilks
Summary: “Don’t worry,” Steve says. “I’m not buying anything you’re not selling.”Tony folds his arms, tugs the too-thin body of his jacket tighter around him. “You don’t know what I’m selling.”“I know what you’ve sold already. Next to that, this should be nothing.”“Get fucked,” Tony says, but Steve only laughs, an ugly, empty sound. Bloodless. False.“That’s the plan."(please mind the tags. further information/warnings in author's note)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [All-Time Low](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13321581) by [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala). 



> Written for a [prompt](https://cap-ironman.dreamwidth.org/1889763.html?thread=14219235#cmt14219235) for the cap_iron-man kink meme which basically asked for a darker, kinkier remix of Sineala’s “All-Time Low.” If you haven’t read “All-Time Low” (and you really should, it’s fabulous), all the background you need to know is that this story is set during the second drinking arc in the comics, wherein Tony falls off the wagon, loses his company to Obadiah Stane, runs away from everyone trying to help him (including Steve), and ends up living homeless on the streets of New York. The prostitution twist is Sine’s innovation, remixed here, with thanks, as well as thanks to the kink meme OP for their wonderfully twisted prompt.
> 
> Decided to break this up into chapters, as it was written serially and it's kind of... a lot to take all at once. But the story is finished, and I'll be updating once or twice a week, as editing allows.
> 
> Warning that while the characters in the story consider themselves to be consenting, that consent is extremely questionable for a whole bunch of reasons (power imbalance, substance abuse, emotional compromise) and some people may find it triggering. Further warnings for suicidal ideation, referenced child abuse, and general fucked-upedness.
> 
> Title is from a poem by Logan February, which will be quoted and linked to at the end of this story.
> 
> Thanks to vicspeaks and wynnesome for brainstorming and alpha reading help, and to hayluhalo, wynnesome, Ironlawyer, and Antrodemus for beta.

The first time Steve asks, Tony says no.

It’s autumn and cold on the streets. Tony has been plying his wares anyway, because this is his life now, and anyway there’s a comfort in routine, even when everything else has gone. The cold is helpful, in its way. It reminds him that time is passing. Apart from that, the nights begin to blur: another streetlamp, another shifty-eyed john shooting down his throat in a back alley or taking him rough and quick on some plasticky motel sheets. Another drink.

The drinking doesn’t exactly help with the blur, except that’s not right, because with the drinking, the blur is the point.

But that night—there’s not enough liquor in the world to blur away that night.

It starts with a stupid mistake: like many a streetwalker before him, he solicits the wrong guy. Except usually when that happens, the wrong guy is a cop, or a raging homophobe, or even some kind of crazed serial killer. He honestly thinks that might have been preferable.

He solicits the wrong guy and now he’s standing here just outside the halo of a streetlamp wondering if maybe he died somewhere between a frosty night and a bottle of Jack because this sure as shit feels like hell to him, except he thinks maybe hell wouldn’t be this cold.

Steve’s eyes are wide enough to drown in, and still blue, still so goddamn blue, even in the half-light of the streets.

He says, come back to the mansion. He says, let us help. He says, Tony, but the name is just a signifier empty of meaning. The man Steve is talking to is gone, long gone, if he ever existed in the first place, so instead he sets his jaw and crosses his arms and watches as horror and pity kindle to anger in Steve’s eye.

I’m not interested in charity, Tony tells him, and _fine,_ Steve says. There’s something in his voice, some kind of sepsis, black and creeping, and Tony remembers reading about old-timey field medicine. You put whiskey in the wound, if you had any, to sterilize it (only didn’t Tony try that?), and if that didn’t work, there was nothing for it but amputation. Tony tried that too.

 _Fine,_ Steve says, _I can work with that,_ and that’s when Tony knows, really and truly knows he’s in hell.

He does the only thing he can think of.

He goes for another drink.

Steve grabs the bottle from his hands and hurls it down the alley behind them. Tony hears it shatter and, to his horror, feels tears prick at his eyes. He wipes at them roughly with the sleeve of his coat and turns his back, starts to walk away.

_Amputation._

Steve grabs him by the arm, hard enough to bruise.

Let me go, Tony says, and _we’re not finished yet,_ Steve says, only his eyes say, _don’t you walk away from me._ His eyes say, _not again._

I think we are, Tony says. He hopes his eyes say that too but how could he possibly know?

The dream-fog of the alcohol is slowly lifting. He could pretend, at the beginning, that this was happening to someone else. Now sobriety comes in and out in waves, drags at him like an undertow. People talk about drowning your sorrows but honest to god liquor is the only way Tony knows how to stay afloat.

 _What’s changed?_ Steve asks. _You were_ “happy enough for a customer a moment ago,” as the world fades back in with hateful clarity.

It’s not the only thing that’s hateful.

Tony can see it now, the way Steve is looking at him, like he wants to burn Tony alive with his gaze, and that’s right, Tony remembers. This is hell. He thought there ought to be flames, and there they are, raging away at the back of Steve’s eyes.

Tony laughs, because what else do you do in hell?

“You’re not a customer,” Tony says, “you’re—”

He can’t think what to say. An echo? A memory? A vengeful ghost?

He thought he’d rid himself of all this now, vomited up all that history in some stinking back alleyway. Alcohol is an emetic after all; it purges memory right along with the rest.

“I’ll pay,” Steve says.

“Not enough.”

“You don’t know what I’m offering yet.”

“There’s not enough money in the world,” Tony tells him, but the words are empty and he knows it. He guesses Steve knows it too, because the martial light in his eye isn’t one of challenge, but of satisfaction. Like Steve already knows he’s won, and it’s just a matter of waiting.

* * *

The next few weeks are rough. Tony gets stiffed a couple of times. Gets robbed. Goes too long without being able to afford a drink. No one wants a whore tremoring through the early stages of alcohol withdrawal. It’s a vicious cycle.

And then there’s Steve, colder than ice and twice as brittle, at least on the surface (but Tony knows what’s underneath, he’s seen those flames), and _have you thought about my offer,_ and yeah, Tony’s thought about it. Has thought more about Steve’s blazing resentment; has spent half his time trying to remember what he did to earn that kind of hatred, and the other half trying to forget the need to remember it. He hasn’t thought about it much in the past few days, though. Hasn’t thought about much of anything apart from how badly he needs a drink.

 _I’ll make it worth your while,_ Steve says, and in the end, that’s all it takes.

“Now?” Tony asks, pressing his hands to his temples, trying to tamp down the buzzing in his skull because this stage of the negotiation is important. If it’s now, he needs to find a way to convince Steve to let him have a drink first, before the withdrawal really starts to fuck him over.

Steve draws in a sharp breath and makes a tiny, abortive movement in Tony’s direction. Then he shakes his head. “Two days from now,” he says. “I need some time to get things together.”

And if that doesn’t sound ominous as fuck.

Tony stiffens, opens his mouth—

“Don’t worry,” Steve says, and his smile barely deserves the name. “I’m not buying anything you’re not selling.”

Tony folds his arms, tugs the too-thin body of his jacket tighter around him. “You don’t know what I’m selling.”

“I know what you’ve sold already. Next to that, this should be nothing.”

“Get fucked,” Tony says, but Steve only laughs, an ugly, empty sound. Bloodless. False.

“That’s the plan,” he says.

Tony drags his foot along the filthy sidewalk and imagines walking away from this. From this fucked up transaction, whatever it is. From the way Steve looks at him, with all the hunger of flames for kindling. From the way Tony looks back, and wonders if it would really be so bad to burn.

A john would come along sooner or later, someone who didn’t care if his rent-a-hole was half dead of delirium tremens so long as he had a warm place to stick his cock, and a john would mean money and money would mean alcohol and alcohol would mean more customers.

He’s made it before. He could make it again. He doesn’t have to do this.

“Two days,” he says. “When exactly should I pencil you in for?”

Steve shrugs. “I’m not sure. But I’ll be there. The usual place,” and his face pulls into a terrible smile because this, now, is something they share. This filthy street corner in the worst part of town has been canonized in their shared history.

_The usual place._

The thought makes Tony kind of sick, but he’s always sick these days: sick from the alcohol, sick from its lack.

“So, what?” he asks, getting angry. “You just want me to spend all day hanging out on a street corner and waiting for you to show up?”

Steve’s eyes are hard. “I looked for you,” he says. “You know that?”

Tony didn’t know that, or at least, he didn’t think Steve would have looked again, after the flophouse. Thought those bridges burned along with the building.

Apparently he was wrong.

“Yeah,” Steve says, “yeah, that’s exactly what I want.”

Tony opens his mouth to tell Steve to go fuck himself, but Steve’s already pulling out his wallet. A fifty. Tony shuts his mouth. Takes the money.

He found a way to live with the hooking. He can find a way to live with this.

Fifty dollars gives him some options.

_Bourbon or rye?_

He heads straight to the liquor store after Steve leaves. Doesn’t bother trying to turn tricks at all the next day. Gets blind drunk and passes out in an alley instead.

He’s on the street corner earlier than ever, even before the sun’s fully set behind the moldy bodegas and run-down tenement buildings. He gets an offer or two before Steve arrives, even though he’s not actually trying to pull. It’s not too surprising. He looks like what he is, and anyway he’s still not a bad-looking guy, even after everything.

He figures he could probably risk a quick suck job in the alley.

He turns them down anyway.

He doesn’t want to imagine what would happen if Steve came looking and found him gone.

Luckily, whiskey makes an awfully good remedy for imagination.

It’s just gone dusk when Steve appears. He’s wearing that godawful hat and trench coat combo he seems to think makes him look inconspicuous. It doesn’t. Nothing in the world could make Steve Rogers blend into a crowd. People used to say the same thing about Tony.

Funny old world.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Tony drawls, like it’s a joke shared between the two of them.

Steve doesn’t smile.

He looks at Tony for a long moment, like there’s something he wants to say. Tony can see it, wild and uncertain behind the bars of his eyes. Then his face shutters.

“Can you walk straight?”

“Don’t tell me you came here looking for straight,” Tony deadpans. He can do this. It’s just playing a role. He’s been doing that his whole life, one way or another.

Steve says nothing. Waits.

Tony hunches his shoulders.

“I can walk,” he says.

Steve clenches his jaw. Nods. That awful look is back on his face and Tony finds he can’t bear to see it anymore. He looks at the ground instead. At the boarded-up window in the building opposite. At the patterns of dust on the window of the bodega across the way.

Steve is breathing heavily, chest heaving, nostrils flaring like a bull preparing to charge. His hands at his sides clench and unclench. Tony knows that look. Steve is wrestling with something.

“I’ll make this worth your while,” he says at last. “But it won’t be easy on you.”

The way he says _easy,_ Tony thinks it means something different to this newer, harder Steve than it would to the one Tony knew. He’s not sure he wants to find out what.

Too bad his wants don’t exactly factor into the situation.

He sticks his hands into his pockets and transfers his weight onto one hip. Hoists up an eyebrow. Smiles coyly at nothing. (He still can’t bring himself to look at Steve straight on.) “How much do you think my while is worth?”

Steve reaches into his pocket and withdraws a wallet, angles it towards Tony. Tony doesn’t get much more of a glimpse before the wallet vanishes again, but it’s enough to see that his while is apparently worth quite a bit indeed.

“What the hell,” Tony says, as if there was any chance he would have refused this. “I can take it.”

Something flashes across Steve’s face, too fast to read. He never had trouble reading Steve before, but then, he wasn’t usually drunk at the time. He’s not exactly at optimum processing capacity.

He decides it doesn’t bother him.

* * *

He’s not quite drunk enough for the subsequent walk to be a blur, but he’s drunk enough that it does strange things to the passage of time. Time contracts for an uncountable number of blocks, only to dilate suddenly when Tony stumbles. Steve’s hand shoots out to steady him. His grip on Tony’s arm is firm, but light.

Tony jerks away.

“I’m not made of porcelain,” he snaps.

The street lights do strange things to Steve’s smile. “Oh,” he says, “I’m counting on it.”

Tony thinks about that. He thinks about the flames in Steve’s eyes that first night, about the livid bruises around his forearm that have yet to fade entirely.

At some point they resume walking.

 _“It won’t be easy on you,”_ Tony remembers.

It occurs to him shortly after that this can’t possibly be happening. It can’t be happening, and therefore it isn’t. That’s about as close to a good thought as he can muster so that’s what he focuses on.

 _Not happening_ , he thinks, when he trips again and Steve lifts him bodily from the sidewalk to set him back on his feet, his hands far less gentle than before.

 _Not happening_ , in the grimy, fluorescent-lit lobby, where Steve stands and talks at the desk while Tony stares at his feet and imagines equations inscribed within the whorls of the industrial carpeting.

 _Not happening,_ in the elevator and down the hallway, _not happening_ as Steve presses the key into his hand, _not happening_ as the door swings open.

And then they’re inside the room and the door is swinging shut behind them and Tony’s mind stutters to a halt as _not happening_ is met with the ineluctable reality of _bed_ before him and _Steve_ behind.

There’s a door on Tony’s left. Steve reaches around Tony, flicks a switch on the wall, and opens the door.

The bathroom, at least what Tony can see of it, is clean but ugly. The tiles on the floor are cracked and the grouting around the edges of the tub is peeling away from the wall.

“I want you to look at me,” Steve says. His voice is low and very rough.

Tony turns his head but not his body. From this position, he can just about make out Steve’s left shoulder.

Steve makes an impatient noise. He grabs Tony by the shoulders and spins him bodily around. Tony stumbles a little, but Steve’s hands are there to steady him.

Tony doesn’t look at Steve’s face. He makes his eyes go unfocused, tracking off the side of Steve’s right shoulder. He isn’t quite sure why he does it, only that the distinction is important somehow, the difference between doing what Steve wants and letting Steve do what he wants with him. He has so few things left to cling to.

Steve releases Tony’s shoulder, takes a step back. Now Tony isn’t staring at Steve at all but at the doorframe behind him.

Steve is breathing heavily again.

“Last chance,” he says.

“For what?” Tony asks the doorframe.

“I could say, ‘to back out,’ but we both know you’re not going to do that.”

The thought of arguing floats across Tony’s mind but finds no traction. His brain seems to be operating on a lag. Clearly something is happening, but he hasn’t quite accepted the fact that that something is the same as the thing that _seems_ to be happening.

“So this is your last chance to do things the easy way. Come back with me to the mansion. Let us help you, or get you help.”

There’s a strained quality to the words. It’s strange. Tony would have expected far more heartfelt a plea.

He chances a glance at Steve’s face, finds it bright and hard and cold. He thinks of sunlight reflecting off of snow. People go blind from that, he thinks.

He lets his gaze fall and drags up an answer from a lifetime ago.

“When have you ever known me to do things the easy way?”

Steve gives a kind of disbelieving snort, and somewhere in the very depths of himself, Tony feels a flicker of anger of his own.

“You think this was easy?” He drags a hand up and down his grimy, emaciated body. He supposes falling does look easy, to someone who’s never tried it.

“I think,” Steve says, “it’s about to get a whole lot harder. Last chance.”

A kind of tingle shoots up Tony’s spine. His tongue darts out to wet his lips—when did his mouth go so dry? He shifts his weight, juts out his hip, striving for a provocative pose, or at least, as close to one as he can get when he can’t even manage to look straight at Steve for more than seconds at a time.

“Bring it on.”

Steve breathes out.

“You know?” he says, and his voice is dark and rich and absolutely swimming with meaning. “I was hoping you’d say that. Here’s how this is going to work. You’re going to let me do whatever I want, tonight.”

Tony frowns and tries to focus, because that doesn’t sound—

“I promise not to do any permanent damage, and I’ll make sure you’re compensated for any…   _lost work—”_ He spits the words out like obscenities. “—more temporary damage might cause. I’ll pay half up front. You can tap out at any time, just get up and walk out of here. I won’t stop you. But if you want the rest of the money, you’ll do what I say.”

Tony rolls the concept of damage, permanent and temporary, around in his mind but he can’t seem to make sense of it. Steve—Steve Rogers—Captain America Steve—is talking about damaging him. But only temporarily?

There’s no script in his head for this situation.

Compensation, now. That’s something concrete. Something he can focus on.

“You’ll pay half of… what?” he asks, seeking to inject a little boredom into his tone, like this is just another transaction. Which it is.

“A thousand dollars.”

The sum is staggering—far more than Tony could dream of earning in a whole month of work. Just how badly is Steve planning to damage him?

Tony isn’t quite sure what makes him argue. “Fifteen hundred.”

Steve huffs out a breath. “You really think,” he says, “that’s how you’re going to get control here? By haggling over the price?”

 _No,_ Tony thinks, and then, _yes_.

He settles on a shrug.

“Fine,” Steve says. “We can play this game. Okay. A thousand fifty.”

“Fourteen hundred,” Tony counters.

Steve takes a slow breath in, and then out. “You honestly think,” he says deliberately, and a soldier down to his core is Steve Rogers, because every word is a weapon, “you’re worth that much?”

 _I think you think that._ The words flash into Tony’s mind, but they—their certainty—doesn’t belong to him. “Take it or leave it,” he says, staring down at Steve’s shoes.

“I paid for this hotel room,” Steve observes evenly. “If anyone’s leaving, it won’t be me.”

He steps to the side, gestures at the door.

“You want to go? I’m not stopping you.”

Tony looks from the door, to Steve, and back to the door again. He imagines himself walking forward, lifting the latch.

“Eleven fifty,” he says, and _please_ in his mind, _please._

_Let me have this. If nothing else, let me have this._

Steve stares at him. Tony doesn’t have to be looking at him to feel his gaze.

He snorts, a laugh with no amusement in it. “Fine,” he says. “Eleven fifty.”

This is Steve humoring him, Tony realizes. This is what passes for kindness now.

Steve pulls out his wallet and begins, ostentatiously, to count out bills. “Half,” he says, and reaches around to slide it into Tony’s back pocket. It’s a straightforward motion, almost impersonal—it’s not like Steve tries to cop a feel or anything—but something about it sends tension crawling through the muscles of Tony’s back. A certain proprietariness. Like Steve has the right to touch Tony however he pleases.

The thought clenches at the base of Tony’s spine, flaring with a low and sickly heat. He supposes it’s true. It’s what he just agreed to, after all.

Steve’s hand glides upwards to rest on Tony’s shoulder. There’s something almost companionable in the gesture, and Tony feels a sudden nostalgia which just as suddenly curdles in his stomach, sour and nauseous.

Steve’s hand tightens and the nostalgia vanishes.

Whatever this is is something new.

Tony’s not sure whether to be frightened or grateful.

Steve turns Tony towards the bathroom door and releases him, nudging him forward with the heel of his hand.

“Inside.”

Stumbling, Tony obeys.

The light in the bathroom is bright and horribly unflattering, turning the golden lights of Tony’s skin to a waxen, cadaverous yellow. Steve couldn’t possibly want him. No one could. But then what are they both doing here?

Tony drags his eyes away from his reflection. Looking back at Steve is another non-starter. Finally he settles his gaze on the sink, the dark, gaping hole of the uncovered drain, the rust-stains on the porcelain surrounding it.

“Look at me.”

Tony drags his eyes up and over. It feels exhausting, the way only physical labor should.

Steve is leaning against the doorjamb, seemingly at ease, but Tony recognizes the tightness in his shoulders. He knows Steve too well to be fooled.

No. Knew. He knew Steve.

Nothing he used to know about Steve would have allowed for something like this. But then, the person Tony was then would never have driven him to it.

Steve holds Tony’s gaze in his for a moment longer. His mouth works; his tongue darts out to wet his lips. He swallows, then nods in sudden decision.

“Strip,” he says.

It feels like the bursting of a bubble, like something inevitable but no less destructive. He’s known, all along, what this was about—Steve has made no secret of it, even _warned_ him. But somehow, to hear it stated so baldly…

His fingers leap to the buttons of his jacket, then slow. He’s a professional, right? That should give him some modicum of control here. He can make this good.

He slides a smile across his face, sly and just a little bit lascivious, ducks his head as he unfastens the buttons, fingers fumbling only a little (the alcohol again). He rolls his shoulders back and, with some vestige of barely-remembered grace, lets the jacket fall down his arms. He gathers it deftly in one hand, casting a glance back at Steve through his lashes.

“I’m not interested in the dog-and-pony show,” Steve says with measured cruelty. “Get your clothes off and stop wasting both of our time.”

Tony feels something impossibly reminiscent of shame seize within his chest. He sheds the rest of his clothes quickly and in silence. He tells himself that he’s a whore now and nudity is his natural state. Nothing to feel self-conscious about.

He still doesn’t look at Steve once he’s done.

“Stand up straight. Face the mirror.”

Tony does.

“Look at your reflection.”

Tony _does._

He hears footsteps, and then Steve appears in the mirror behind him. The light does something different to him than it did to Tony—picks out the gold in his hair, highlights the paleness of his skin. He looks like something biblical. An avenging angel. The wrath of the god.

Steve makes no move to touch him. Tony can hardly blame him. In contrast to Steve, he looks hideously frail, grotesquely mortal. Half of humankind was created from a rib, by some people’s reckoning. You can count every one of Tony’s.

“Here’s the thing,” Steve says, and his voice is hard, utterly uncompromising. “I’ve known a few addicts in my time. Some of them have turned things around. The others… haven’t. And the ones who make it out? They all say the same thing.”

Steve meets Tony’s eyes in the mirror.

“They had to hit rock bottom first.”

And _oh,_ Tony thinks, like he’s just figured out the twist in a movie, like this is happening to someone else, _oh._

“Once they knew there was nowhere, _nowhere_ further to fall, well. That’s when they started working their way back up. So here’s my theory.”

Steve leans forward, just a little, but enough that Tony can now feel the currents of his breath against the back of his head.

“You haven’t actually gotten there yet. Losing your company, your armor, your _friends—”_ The word twists even as Steve speaks it into something animal and misshapen. Steve clamps his jaw shut, then begins again, tone measured once more. “That wasn’t enough. Your change of careers? Wasn’t enough.”

And oh god but Tony wants out, but he’s trapped between Steve and the sink, and anyway, he’s naked as the day he was born, and anyway, where in the world would he possibly go? What is there that’s left to him, apart from this?

He wishes Steve would hit him. He wonders if this is what Steve meant by “damage.”

“Maybe it’s the whoring,” Steve says, and Tony could have called his voice musing, if not for the rage still blazing in his eyes. At some point he must have moved closer still, because Tony can feel the heat of him at his back. It’s almost more intimate than touch, the way Steve can affect him through proximity alone. “Maybe you like that. You’re a businessman, or at least, you were. Maybe that means something to you, to be a commodity, to see your worth measured out in dollars and cents. Maybe it excites you, even.”

 _Just hit me,_ Tony thinks, _for fuck’s sake, just_ hit _me_.

“But you are—” His mouth pulls. _“—were_ worth something to me. So I’m going to help you. I’m going to give you what you need to get through this.” Steve leans forward, and now his breath is hot in Tony’s ear. “Let’s see just how close to the bottom we can get, hmm?”

Tony stands frozen. He thinks if he moved he would have to do something, but he can’t even begin to fathom what, so he keeps himself still. He barely even breathes.

“Get yourself hard,” Steve says. “Other than that, don’t move.”

He leaves the room.

Tony lets his eyes drift shut and slowly, slowly, wraps his fingers around his cock. He tries to remember what he used to think of, when getting off was something that actually had any meaning or value for him. He thinks he thought of old lovers, sometimes, but those memories seem far beyond his reach.

He thinks he thought of Steve, kind of a lot.

Steve, who is in the other room. Steve, who ordered him to strip, who told Tony he was going to break him down to the very bottom, give him _what he needs._

To his disgust, he can feel his cock beginning to fill. He always knew there was something broken about him but he never realized quite how badly broken it was.

He’s just about managed to work himself to a full erection when Steve returns, carrying a cardboard box printed with a picture of a large rubber bag. And a hose. And a nozzle, oh god…

“You know what this is?”

Tony attempts a sneer. “I am a professional.”

Steve’s eyebrows inch upwards. “You know how to use it?”

Tony’s cheeks flare hot at the implication. He forgets that he’s supposed to be cocky and confident and provocative, gives a jerky nod instead.

Steve drops the box on the counter next to the sink.

“Take a shower. Get clean. Come out as soon as you’re done. Don’t bother bringing a towel.”

“You don’t want to watch?” Tony asks, injecting something coy into his tone.

Steve’s lip wrinkles in unfeigned distaste. “Why would I want to see _that?”_ His eyes flick down to Tony’s erection, which is flagging a little. “Keep yourself hard,” he adds, “but don’t come.”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Tony lies.

“We’ll see,” is all Steve says.


	2. Chapter 2

For all of his posturing, Tony has never actually used an enema kit before. Anal sex—especially with him as catcher—wasn’t a big fixture of his life before, and these days, he doesn’t exactly have the choosiest of clientele.

It’s even more humiliating than he imagined. All that water flowing into him, impossibly deep, filling him up in ways he never imagined, a thousand times more intimate, more invasive than mere penetration. He feels bloated; unnatural. There’s a pain sharp and twisting in his gut. It almost reminds him of hunger pangs, except that hunger is a pain born of emptiness, not this horrible, grotesque fullness.

As for the rest of it, well.

The less said of that, the better.

He’s glad Steve didn’t want to see this.

He tries to prep himself a little in the shower, fingers scissoring in his hole, working himself loose. He’s learned not to expect much patience from his clients when it comes to that kind of preparation, and god, he can still barely hold the idea of ‘client’ and the idea of ‘Steve’ together in the same thought. He wonders if this isn’t some kind of hallucination, born of liquor, or maybe just the desperate graspings of a pathetic, broken-down mind—wonders if he won’t walk out of the bathroom to find some other john, not Steve at all, but just another big and bulky blond guy looking for cheap tail.

Not that Tony  _ is  _ cheap. Not this time, anyway.

Unless that part was a dream too.

Still, whoever the john is, he’s taken Tony’s clothes, and with them, his access to lube. He uses conditioner from one of the complimentary bottles instead and wonders if Steve will notice the smell. Wonders if Steve will be angry.

Thinks that there’s not much he can do at this point about Steve’s anger, except try to ride it out—gives a hysterical sort of snort at the unintended pun and ends up with a nose full of water.

It  _ burns. _ Burns worse than whiskey when it enters his lungs, and he doubles over, wheezing and hacking. From this new position, gravity is much harder to resist. He sinks to the ground, folding in upon himself until his forehead is inches above the rust-stained floor of the bath, and thinks about what it would feel like to drown.

He thinks it would be easy. All he’d have to do is lie here and let the water do the rest. He’s gotten pretty good at just letting things happen.

But he won’t do that. Not least because he doesn’t actually want to die, even if he can’t really think of a reason to live.

But more importantly than that, if he gives in—if he dies here, he won’t get paid. And if he doesn’t get paid, it’ll mean he’s let Steve do all of this to him  _ for free. _ Like a beaten dog, slinking back to its master for another blow.

Looks like Steve is right.

He does have something to lose after all.

The overhead light is off in the main room. The only sources of illumination are two bedside lamps and a single standing light beside a small table. Steve—and looking at him, Tony no longer harbors any doubt that it is Steve; he’s never in his life encountered someone else who occupies space the way Steve does, the way he always seems larger than his size, as if the very fabric of the universe has to shift and fold to accommodate him—Steve is in an armchair next to the table, still fully clothed. He hasn’t even bothered to take off his boots. The fact that Tony recognizes it for a power play doesn’t stop the hot, prickling crawl of humiliation under his too-taut skin. He didn’t know it was possible to feel this naked.

Steve is reading something, leafing through a thick sheaf of papers. The upper half of his body is in shadow, but as Tony moves forward, he lays the papers aside and leans forward so that the light catches the broad planes of his face. There’s a flicker of movement which could be the working of Steve’s throat as he swallows, or could just be a trick of the light.

Tony realizes he’s standing still now, though he doesn’t remember coming to a halt. He stares at Steve, at where Steve’s eyes must be, buried in the dark craters beneath his brows. He reminds himself that this is just a game—a show. Just another trick, whatever Steve thinks. The only real power here is the power Tony gives him. And maybe he’s lost the knack of holding onto things—spent too much time learning to let others take, but this? This thing here between them? He knows this. He’s learned this. He’s played this game a hundred times before.

_ Not with Steve, _ a nasty little voice inside him whispers.  _ Never with Steve. _

He ignores the voice. He’s learned that too.

He places his hand high on the wall and leans against it, hip jutting out suggestively. He smiles a lie and licks his lips.

It’s difficult to tell in the half-light, but he thinks he sees Steve’s face tighten. Then he leans back in the chair and his features are lost once more to shadow.

“Come here,” Steve says.

Tony saunters forward, or at least, as close to a saunter as he can manage with his limbs still not entirely under his control.

The room seems to stretch—inches to feet, feet to yards, yards to weary miles. He tries to keep his gaze focused, but he can’t seem to stop noticing things. The way the comforter on the bed sits slightly askew. The large water stain on the generic, framed floral print. The slight gleam where the light from the floor lamp hits the leather of Steve’s boots. He must have polished them recently. He always took such care of his possessions.

Tony’s mind shies away from the thought. The last thing he needs to be thinking of right now is Steve and care.

“Stop,” Steve says. His voice is even deeper than normal, a little ragged around the edges, but the command is unmistakable.

Tony stops.

He’s still a few feet away from Steve. It’s easy to tell that because he’s looking directly at the floor now. He forces his eyes upwards.

Steve’s face is only marginally more readable than it was from a distance.

“You’ve cleaned yourself?”

“As requested.”

A fraction of a second’s pause.

“Inside and out?”

“You wanna check?” Tony shoots back, and bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. He used to know how to keep his mouth shut. He must’ve drunk away that control with all the rest.

Something flashes in Steve’s eyes. “Actually? Yes.” For a moment there’s something in his voice, hard and fierce and wounded and human, but when he speaks again, his voice is very even, very calm. “Turn around.”

Tony just stares at him. He’s still struggling to process. He asked— And Steve said  _ yes _ —

Steve makes a little twirling gesture with his fingers. His cheeks lift, but only according to its barest mechanics could the expression be called a smile.

Tony shrugs. He’s aiming for a languid, leisurely thing, but it turns out twitchy; spasmodic.

“It’s your money,” he says. He thinks about adding something else—“baby,” “big guy,” “handsome”—a whore’s endearment, but the words stick in his throat.

He turns.

“Bend over.”

He bends.

Another blink-and-you-miss-it pause, a frozen silence there and gone in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

“Spread,” Steve says.

Tony reminds himself that at least Steve can’t see his face. He has that much to be thankful for. 

“Gonna do a cavity search?” he asks. “This some kind of role playing thing? The junkie and the naughty cop?”

Steve says nothing.

“Or,” Tony adds, and his face is smiling, quite of its own accord, cheeks pulled back into a death’s-head grin, “does that cut a little close to the bone?”

Because it does, it  _ does _ , a bright slash of pain, and he may not have his chosen anesthetic on hand at the moment, but at least if he plays this right, the knife will cut both ways.

…except this is Steve he’s talking about, Steve he’s thinking about hurting like it’s some kind of shitty consolation prize—‘sorry, no medal for you, but at least you get to emotionally brutalize Captain America’—and what the hell does that say about him?

Nothing he didn’t already know, that’s what.

He’s known for a long time that he’s worthless.

If the blow lands, Steve doesn’t show it.     

“Are we doing this?” he asks.

“I could ask you the same question,” Tony fires back.

“Are we,” Steve echoes,  _ “doing this?  _ Or are you tapping out?”

_You can tap out anytime_ , Steve said.

He reaches for another glib, easy answer and comes up short. He reaches for anything—anything at all and feels something hot and fierce and wavering—the flare of an ember, almost burned out.

“I’m not tapping out,” he says.

He hears Steve exhale long and slow behind him, and allows himself just for a moment to imagine relief in the sound. But when Steve speaks again, the illusion is dispelled: his voice is all steel.

“Then spread.”

Tony waits for him to add something about Tony keeping his mouth shut. Some of his johns like to say things like that. “Nobody likes a mouthy whore,” they’ll say, regardless of whether or not Tony has actually been talking, because in the end it comes down to control and they want to prove they’ve bought Tony’s voice along with the rest of him.

Steve doesn’t say anything like that, and somehow that makes everything worse. Like it doesn’t matter what Tony says. Like the ability to speak words with impact and meaning is yet another power that has been lost or taken from him.

He wonders how much of himself he’ll have left by the time the night is through.

_ Let’s see how close to the bottom we can get. _

Tony places his hands behind himself, digs his fingers into flesh and muscle, pulls his cheeks apart, and utterly fails to think of this as a transaction.

Someone breathes in, loud and harsh in the quiet room.

Tony shuts his eyes and listens to the faint rustle of clothing, the chair creaking beneath shifting weight. Feels the churning of his own stomach; feels the blood pounding in his veins. There’s a moment of utter silence, still and tense as a caught breath. Then the chair creaks again and Tony barely has time to think before large, work-roughened hands close over his hips and tug him backwards.

It’s only a step or two, but even so, he stumbles and almost overbalances. But Steve’s hands are still on his waist (touching him, god, Steve is  _ touching him)  _ and Steve won’t let him fall. Not unless he’s the one giving the push.

“Bend your knees,” Steve says, and now there’s a hand on Tony’s tailbone, bearing down.

His knees bend. 

The pressure stops.

He feels steadier now. Better distribution of weight, he realizes, and feels like ten kinds of idiot. Here he is, the man who was once the world’s greatest engineer, and he can’t even figure out how to balance his own body.

Steve’s hand is still on Tony’s lower back, no longer pressing down. Just resting. Somehow that makes it all the harder to bear. Tony’s just about to tell him to get on with it already when Steve’s fingers start to move.

His other hand is still on Tony’s hip, gripping hard enough to bruise, but the hand on Tony’s back moves with unspeakable gentleness. A thumb strokes across the ridges at the base of Tony’s spine, another digit rubbing at the groove just where the cheeks of Tony’s ass begin to part. Behind him, Steve’s breathing is growing louder, more labored. It’s a sound Tony has heard a hundred times before in a hundred different back alleyways and cheap motel rooms and everything is the same and nothing is and Tony thinks he might be going out of his mind.

_ “Steve.”  _

It’s a moment before Tony recognizes his own voice. Certainly he didn’t intend to speak.

The movement on his back ceases. Both hands lift away. Tony’s skin burns with the absence.

Not for long, though, because now there’s a thumb pressing at the edge of his hole, and then another finger tugging and stretching the skin around the rim. Steve hasn’t bothered with lube. Tony’s still loose enough from his prep in the shower that it doesn’t hurt, exactly, but there’s the promise of pain in every touch. Is that going to be his punishment, then? Is Steve going to take him dry? Does he really think Tony’s never had worse? Laughter bubbles behind his ribs, covering up the deeper roil of something that cannot possibly be disappointment.

It can’t be disappointment because disappointment would mean Tony wants this.

He feels a finger begin to press at his entrance, thinks about how he used to lie in bed and tease himself open and imagine it was Steve.

No one in the world could be enough of a masochist to want this.

A rumble from behind him.

“Relax.”

The word doesn’t match the tone and it’s a moment before Tony realizes that that’s because it wasn’t a reassurance but a command. He forces himself to relax his muscles, to bear down on Steve’s encroaching finger.

It’s the least of what Steve has paid for.

The finger is inside him now, to the first knuckle. It rubs at his inner walls, crooking, tugging at the muscle there, and Tony bites down hard on his lip. He stares at an oblong stain on the carpet and thinks about how it’s Steve inside him but the thought doesn’t quite seem to fit.

Steve withdraws his finger and wipes it brusquely on the flesh of Tony’s thigh, as if even after his cleaning, Tony is unspeakably filthy. Tony remembers lying on the floor of the shower, wonders again what it would feel like to drown.

“You’ve prepped yourself,” Steve says.

It takes Tony a moment to speak—a moment to realize that speech is a power still remaining to him.

“A little.”

Steve makes a sound like  _ hmph _ . It could mean anything. “You can straighten up now,” he says.

Tony straightens, feeling the creak and twinge of each individual vertebra. He realizes he’s gone most of the way soft and gives himself a few surreptitious strokes before he turns around.

He knows what he’ll find but apparently knowing isn’t preparation enough: the sight of Steve still strikes him to the core. He wonders if it’ll be like this all night. If so, he’ll be dead of heart failure before morning. Part of him thinks maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

For a moment, he and Steve just look at each other. Then:

“There’s a bag on the table,” Steve says. “Center pocket on the near side.”

He picks up his discarded sheaf of papers. Tony thinks at first he’s moving them out of the way, until Steve flips back the first page. He’s reading them. Like Tony isn’t even worth his full attention.

“Go on,” Steve says.

Tony moves, though whether or not it was through any conscious intervention of his mind he couldn’t say. Opens the pocket. Closes his fingers around something tapered, hard, and bulbous. Pulls it out.

Dumbly, Tony stares down at the object in his hand—a large black buttplug, with two plastic rings attached by a short cord. At least he won’t have to worry about how to keep himself hard, he thinks.

“There’s lube on the table,” Steve says.

Tony says nothing; continues to stare. The cock ring waggles obscenely as his hand trembles. He feels impossibly far—galaxies, lightyears—beyond his ability to predict anything that’s going on here.

“Unless you need help.”

Steve’s tone is mild—almost suspiciously so.  _ A feint, _ warn those last few instincts that Tony hasn’t managed to drown in off-brand Tennessee whiskey, and sure enough:

“All you need to do is ask.”

Tony can’t quite keep himself from flinching.

“I’ve got it,” he says roughly.

Steve snorts. “I can see that.”

They both know he’s not talking about the damn butt plug.

Steve holds his gaze a beat or two longer, before dropping his eyes back to the papers in his hand.

Tony isn’t sure whether or not that’s a victory.

He guesses it doesn’t matter much either way.

He reaches for the lube.

* * *

The cock ring goes on easily enough but the plug is big and Tony can’t seem to relax. Seconds tick away as he works it into himself. He tries to stifle his grunts and groans, tries to shut his ears to the sharp rustle of Steve turning pages in the background.

Finally, it’s in. Tony thinks of what comes next, and draws a blank. Does he tell Steve he’s done? Or does he wait for the next instruction?

But Steve must be paying closer attention than he’s let on, because he lowers the papers in his hand.

“Ready?”

The laugh tears itself up and out of Tony’s chest before he can stop it, a vicious, jagged thing that twists halfway through into a hacking cough, leaves his throat sore and lungs aching. He presses a hand to his chest.

“Tony.”

Steve’s tone is sharp; his gaze when Tony lifts his eyes is searching.

“Steve,” Tony parodies. His voice comes out as a rasp and he thumps himself on the chest again, trying to clear his lungs.

“Are you…” Steve starts quickly and slows halfway through, appearing to change course. “Are you sick?”

Tony’s lips stretch in a smile. “I’m clean,” he says.

“That’s not what I meant.”

He snorts. “I’m an alcoholic. It’s not contagious. And even if it was, you’ve got that nifty enhanced immune system to fall back on.”

“You  _ know _ that’s not—” Steve breaks off, face darkening, like storm clouds massing in the sky. “Fine,” he says, so quietly that Tony isn’t sure he was meant to hear. Then he drops the papers onto the table with a thud that makes Tony jump, and leans back in his chair. His thighs fall open. “Come here,” he says, gesturing between them, and, “On your knees,” and now he’s pulling down his fly and it looks like this is really happening.

Tony imagines dropping to his knees where he stands and crawling, making a real show of it, turning obedience into an act of defiance but even as he’s thinking it he’s walking forward, jerky and uncoordinated. His knees fold when he reaches Steve, like someone’s snuck up behind him and cut the tendons. Like gravity’s his only recourse.

It hurts when his knees hit the floor.

Now his face is level with Steve’s cock. It’s just as big as he imagined, and uncut—he imagined that too. Technically speaking, this is a dream come true.

Steve leans across him, fishing around in the bag. Something tinkles faintly.

“Hand,” Steve says peremptorily, and presses something small and round into Tony’s palm. It jingles as Tony closes his fingers over it.

“Hands behind your back. Like this.” Steve demonstrates, arms crossed, hands cupping his elbows. “Don’t let the bell drop. Unless you’re tapping out. You drop that, all of this stops.”

Tony puts his arms behind his back, tucking the bell as securely as he can between his palm and his elbow, and then finally, finally looks back up at Steve’s face.

It’s a mistake.

Steve is staring at him like he wants to eat him alive, rage and—yes, undeniably, with the evidence jutting boldly forth mere inches away from his face—lust lighting fires behind the blackness of his eyes.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Steve says, and his voice is hoarse. He clears his throat. “I’ve still got some reports to get through.”

For an instant the world blurs out of focus. A faint roaring fills Tony’s ears. Steve is reading Avengers reports. Here. He brought them  _ here _ .

“So I’m going to finish my work—” There’s the faintest stress on the pronoun, curling with contempt, and okay, Steve wants Tony to suck him off. Tony can do that. It doesn’t matter what Steve is reading. A dick is a dick when it comes down to it and at least this way he won’t have to look at Steve’s face.

Except Steve is still talking.

“—and you’re going to keep my cock warm while I do it. That’s all I need you to be, a warm place to put my cock. You’re not going to lick. You’re not going to suck. You’re not going to run away to a flop house and drink yourself into a stupor. You’re going to  _ stay where I put you _ and focus on my cock. You got that?”

Tony gives a jerky nod. There are no words.

“I want to hear you say it,” Steve says, and Tony thinks he should’ve predicted that.

“I got it,” he croaks.

How bad can it be?

Steve is staring at him. A muscle tics in his jaw. Then he says: “I think you should use my name when you talk to me. Wouldn’t want you to forget who you’re here with.”

It’s true what they say about old habits. Even when you’ve spent months poisoning your mind and body, pissing your pride and your identity down the drain, some patterns tend to linger, like the afterimages of another life. Take Tony Stark, drive him into a corner and leave a weapon in his reach…

“Got it, Winghead,” he says, and in the next moment tears start to his eyes as a hand seizes in his hair and hauls his head back.

“You don’t get,” Steve says, and he’s so angry he’s spitting—Tony feels the droplets hit his cheek, “to use that name.” He pulls tighter on Tony’s scalp, shaking him like a doll, and Tony lets out an involuntary gasp of pain. “Not now.”

The hand releases and Tony sags. Above him, Steve is breathing hard, the way he only gets after a fight.

Finally, Steve’s breathing calms. “Let’s try this again. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Tony says, and hesitates. “Steve.”

Steve’s smile is ghastly. “Open wide,” he says. His hand is almost gentle as it guides Tony’s mouth onto his cock.

* * *

Steve’s cock tastes pretty much like any other. Cleaner than some, maybe. He expected…

He doesn’t know what he expected. Anyway, he’s far beyond any place where expectations have weight.

It’s an endurance position, calling on every ounce of Tony’s diminished strength. With his arms behind his back, he has no way to brace himself, but if he slumps even a fraction of an inch, all he does is impale himself further on Steve’s cock.

He wonders if Steve intended it that way. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t, and equally hard to imagine he did. It’s hard to imagine anything that’s happening right now, even as Tony is living it. He has no context for any of this.

The minutes tick by and after a while the world kind of fades away. Tony fades with it, mind finally going quiet. There’s nothing but the burn in his muscles and the fullness in his mouth, the distant sound of paper rustling and the more distant sound of Steve’s breathing. It’s almost as good as being drunk, and he feels a distant pang of fear, because anything good he’ll have to pay for.

A soft thud startles Tony out of his quiet place, and he realizes he hasn’t heard Steve turn pages in quite some time.

“God,” Steve breathes. “Look at you,” and Tony can’t even begin to parse the emotions swirling through his voice.

A hand smooths through his hair and he forces himself not to flinch.

“Tony,” Steve murmurs. “Tony Stark.”

Tony shudders. It’s the first time he’s heard his full name in… he doesn’t know how long. 

“The Avengers just aren’t the same without you. You always were the best of us.”

Tony makes a soft, protesting noise in his throat, but there’s not much more he can do with Steve in his mouth, and anyway, Steve is still talking.

“The most brilliant, the most heroic. All head and heart. I never met a man with as much to give as you.” The hand in his hair seizes suddenly, tugging Tony’s head back as he blinks away surprise and pain. “And you threw it away,” Steve says, roughly, “to be a body and a bundle of cravings. So that’s how I’m going to treat you.”

He stands up, his grip on Tony’s hair pulling Tony along with him until he’s fully upright on his knees.

“I’m going to use you now,” he says. His other hand drops to cup Tony’s cheek, thumb brushing almost tenderly across Tony’s cheekbone, even as his words give the gesture the lie. “Your participation will not be required.”

And then Steve is fucking into him with hard, brutal strokes that batter the back of Tony’s throat. Tony can almost feel his bones rattling with the force of it, and he’s too full, too overwhelmed, he can’t breathe. He clutches the bell more tightly to him, and Steve doesn’t care where he goes in his mind—Steve doesn’t care about his mind at all.  _ A body and a bundle of cravings _ . That’s all Tony is to him now.

He shuts his eyes and watches stars wheel and burst through the unsteady darkness, racing across his vision too fast to hold.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve pulls out before he comes, one hand in Tony’s hair holding him in place as viscous warmth spatters his face and chest. Tony wanted this, once.

In a past life, Tony jerked himself to completion more than once at the thought of Steve claiming him this way, lewd and filthy and owning. He knew at the time, of course, that it was impossible. Steve could never want that. Want him. Would be horrified, if he knew even half the things Tony thought about him, and the shame of that knowledge lent a bright and bruising edge to Tony’s pleasure.

He feels come slide down his cheek, darts out his tongue to taste where it splashed across his upper lip. Steve exhales in a noisy rush and Tony feels like he’s drifting through outer space, untethered. No gravity. No way of telling up from down. No source of air. No hope of recovery.

“You can let go now,” Steve says, and Tony loosens his grip on his elbows. His fingers are stiff and clumsy; a twinge in his shoulder as he lowers his arms promises greater aches to come. He reaches up to wipe away a trickle of come fallen dangerously near his eye.

“Leave it.”

Tony hesitates.

Lets his hand drop.

Carefully, he opens his eyes.

Steve’s breathing is heavy, his face flushed, chest heaving as though he’s just run a marathon.

“If you’re looking to mark your territory, piss is traditional.” Tony can barely recognize his own voice. It sounds the way a burned-out building looks. Fire-gutted. Charred to the bone. He can still taste Steve in his mouth. He wonders how much drink it will take to wash the taste away. “But I should warn you: watersports cost extra.”

“You’re not my territory,” Steve says.

A thought tumbles across Tony’s mind:  _ Then what the hell am I? _

Steve presses the back of his wrist to his lips and holds it there. His eyelids droop, then lower entirely. He is so beautiful it hurts to look at him, although that might just be crossed wires. There are, after all, so many places for Tony to draw pain from. His shoulders. His throat. His knees. His scalp where Steve pulled on it. His stomach, keening for more alcohol. His chest, a steady and relentless ache. Pain is an infinitely renewable resource.

It seems like an eternity before Steve’s breathing slows. It seems like no time at all.

He lowers his hand.

“On the bed.”

Tony pushes himself up, knees trembling as he stands. Steve doesn’t offer to help and Tony doesn’t ask. He stumbles over to the bed, joints clicking unpleasantly.

He can feel sobriety stealing over him like a sickness, a burgeoning buzz of static over a once silent radio. He imagines telling Steve he needs a drink before they can continue. He thinks he could just about brazen it out—flash a dazzling smile (teeth not so white as they were, but so it goes),  _ “Just one thing, before we continue…” _ He could do this, with another drink in him. He’s gotten used to living in a starvation economy; he needs so very little to survive. Just this. Just one more drink. It hardly seems so much to ask.

He’s already got his mouth open and is struggling to string together the requisite words—the gestures, the mannerisms—when it occurs to him that Steve might very well refuse. Might embrace the opportunity to draw another line in the sand—might rejoice at another piece of control—another fragment of Tony’s damn  _ soul _ , broken down and picked over as it is—dropped right into his lap. And then Tony will have to choose between obeying, and proving himself too weak to stand up to Steve’s demands, or refusing, which will be tantamount to tapping out—proof he couldn’t hack it after all. Whichever way you slice it, Tony loses.

He says nothing.

Climbs onto the bed.

He tries, as much out of habit as anything else, to arrange himself in an appealing sprawl, but he’s not taking his new accessories into account, and when he lowers his ass to the mattress it hits just wrong, shoving the plug right up into him. He gasps and bucks his hips as a wave of violation sweeps through him, and tries to ignore the darts of pleasure that streak crimson in its wake. Steve makes a noise low in his throat.

Tony manages to stretch out on his side, but he’s panting a little, inner muscles still squeezing convulsively around the plug. He is acutely aware of the rings locked tight around his cock and balls. He can feel himself starting to sweat.

He looks up to see Steve standing beside the bed. The bedside lamp casts a warm glow over the nearest side of him, leaving his right half in shadow. Tony can see that he’s holding something in his right hand, but he can’t make out what it is .

Steve shifts. When he finally speaks, his voice is oddly constricted. “This next part will be… hard. On you. So I’m going to—” His mouth works. “Help.”

Tony barely has time to wonder what Steve—this strange, new, hardened Steve—would think of as ‘helping’ before Steve lifts up his hand and shows him.

Tony’s mouth goes dry. He blinks, once, twice, several times more, trying to get the image in front of him to resolve into anything other than what it is.

For a long moment they stay like that, Tony gazing transfixed at the coils of rope falling over Steve’s wrist and arm, Steve looking down at Tony.

“Are you waiting for me to thank you?” Tony asks finally.

Steve snorts. “You?”

But the spell seems to have broken.

“Turn around,” Steve says.

Steve ties a harness around Tony’s chest and back, a latticework of lines and knots that might almost be called elegant if it didn’t set Tony’s whole body prickling with foreboding. He wonders where Steve learned to do this. Not the army, that’s for damn sure. He wonders if maybe this is something Steve did with one of his girlfriends. The idea seems laughable, and yet…

He could always ask. Steve would hate that.

He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want to know. The less he knows, the easier it’ll be, later, to pretend this wasn’t real.

He shuts his eyes as calloused hands skim down his sides—too gentle, god, god—tug and pluck at the bindings, testing the strength and security of the knots, and thinks about how one day this will just be another bad dream.

The thought is about as close a thing to comfort as anything that isn’t waiting at the bottom of a bottle, these days.

Tony endures in stoic silence as Steve binds his hands behind his back. But when Steve lays him out on his back and proceeds to tie his calves to his thighs, he can’t suppress a small noise of protest.

Steve stops in his tracks.

“Something you wanted to say?”

There’s a tautness to his words, a low thrumming tension that might be excitement and might be apprehension and might be something else entirely. Tony strains upwards. A combination of disuse, malnutrition, and drink has atrophied his core muscles to a shadow of their former strength, but he manages to lift head and shoulders off the mattress. He’s trying for a look at Steve’s face but the light’s too dim and the angle’s all wrong.

Steve is watching him; he can see that much. His hands on Tony are perfectly still, one spanning his upper thigh, the other braced on the opposite knee. He wonders if Steve is waiting for him to break—if Steve thinks this is the line he won’t cross.

In that case he’ll be disappointed. Limits imply the existence of a spectrum, a series of data points plotted across a period of time. Limits are for people with a past, with a future.

There is no history in the gutter. No trajectory. No time. There is only what can be borne, and what cannot.

Tony can bear this. Better with another drink in him, but— No. Don’t go there.

Tony can bear this.

He slumps backwards onto the mattress and stares into empty space.

“Not really,” he says, in response to Steve’s question, and yelps as a vicious pinch is administered to his inner thigh.

“Not really,  _ what?” _

It’s a moment before he understands.

“Not really,  _ Steve,” _ he says, falling into a dull kind of singsong. “Just awaiting your pleasure.”

Steve sucks in a breath, hands tightening convulsively.

“Yes. You are.”

His fingers curl inwards, close-trimmed nails biting crescents into Tony’s flesh.

Tony bites down on his lip, and endures.

* * *

Steve finishes tying Tony’s legs and moves back, presumably to survey his handiwork. Tony thinks about the picture he must make: arms disappearing behind his back; hips propped to display his plugged ass and leaking cock; legs folded like a frog’s and ludicrously bound, floppy and ineffectual.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. He tries not to think about the fact that Steve is still fully clothed. Tries to remember how not to think about things. He thinks the answer probably involves liquor. He tries not to think about that either. He reaches for the last remnants of his drunkenness, the distance and the blur, wraps them tight around himself like a tattered coat. A meagre protection, and failing fast, but god knows it’s better than nothing.

Steve has gone to fish around some more in that bag of his, and Tony takes the opportunity to test the limits of his immobility. If he pulls his feet up flush with his ass, braces his heels against the pillow, shoves his shoulders back into the mattress, and arches his back, he can just about manage to shift himself. Not much—even a few inches are a strain. But some.

Someone shoves his knees apart. His heels slide sideways and lose their traction as his legs splay and he collapses back against the mattress.

“Better,” Steve says, and moves to sit on the edge of the bed. As he turns, Tony catches a glimpse of the bulge at the front of his trousers.

Steve is hard again.

It’s strange. He never would’ve pegged Steve for a sadist. Maybe in his wildest dreams, once upon a time, but never for real.

Just one more thing he was wrong about.

Steve has to be a sadist, because the only other explanation is that it’s  _ Tony  _ he— And. 

Well.

Tony knows what he is. He’s a thing for using. Not a thing for wanting.

Steve finishes taking off his boots and starts to roll up his sleeves. Tony watches the muscles of his forearm flex and cord. The lamplight catches in the sparse layer of hair there, just for a moment, limning his silhouette in gold. Tony turns his face away. He stares at the ceiling and unfocuses his eyes, trying to determine the exact point when the roughcast plaster finish blurs away into smoothness.

Steve’s weight shifts on the bed, coming to settle between Tony’s bound legs. He pushes them back and apart until Tony is folded like an accordion, knees somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulders, ass laid open and bare.

It’s not exactly a surprise when Steve touches him, but Tony still flinches when a hand curls around his long-neglected cock. Apart from commanding him to stay hard, Steve has up until now shown little interest in this part of Tony. Few of Tony’s customers do. Occasionally one of them wants to jerk him, out of misplaced guilt or in some cavemannish display of sexual prowess, but even then it’s perfunctory. Fast and crude. They get him off like ticking a box. They don’t care about making it good.

No one touches him like this, cradling him like he’s something precious. Something worthy of care. Steve’s palm is dry and rough with callouses.  It would hurt if Steve jerked him, but Steve makes no attempt to do so. A finger ghosts across Tony’s slit, and Tony twitches and dribbles precome. Steve catches it with his thumb, drags it down the underside of Tony’s head, working it up and down the frenulum in maddeningly deliberate strokes. Tony tries and fails to choke down a whimper. 

“Good,” Steve says, a ragged whisper. Tony doesn’t even know if Steve is speaking to him or just making an observation, but the word shivers down the length of his spine and settles flutteringly into his gut.

Steve sighs and tilts his head forward. The sweep of his hair brushes Tony’s abdomen where the skin peeps through between the ropes, and for one crazy moment Tony wonders if Steve is going to take him into his mouth.

Sensation punches through him, nerves screaming with stimulation as, without warning, Steve puts a hand on the plug and  _ shoves, _ pushing it in as deep as it will go. Tony’s mouth falls open on a gasp, vision sparking as his body is engulfed in prickling, feverish heat. One of Tony’s legs must have fallen forward, because Steve releases his cock to shove it back again, other hand grasping the plug by its base and beginning to work it in slow, tilting circles.

“Like… that…” and Tony still doesn’t know who Steve is talking to, but he can’t bring himself to care. Each movement of the plug tugs on the rings around his cock and balls, reminding him how bound he is, owned and open and thoroughly overmastered. He’s taking in breath in desperate little voiced gasps— _ “ah, ah, ah” _ —but the sound is almost lost under the roaring in his ears. 

But after a minute or so, the shock of it begins to fade. The movements of the plug no longer consume him; the spots fade from his eyes. His breathing steadies. This… is what’s happening to him, and it’s… Okay. Bearable. Yes. The abruptness threw him—so much here seems designed to throw him—but when it comes down to it, he’s being fucked in the ass. That’s all this is. Nothing that hasn’t happened before. Nothing that won’t happen again. 

Just another fucking. He can take it. He knows he can. Everything else is… details.

That’s when Steve begins to speak.

“You’re tight,” he says, and his voice is low, musing and melodic and  _ ugly. _ “I noticed that before. Even after the shower. Even now.”

He’s pulling on the base of the plug now, tugging and twisting and rocking all at the same time, like someone trying to work the cork out of a champagne bottle, and Tony really didn’t mean to think of champagne. He hasn’t tasted champagne in— He doesn’t even know how long. In all likelihood, he’ll never taste it again. 

Doesn’t matter. It’d be wasted on him anyway. Liquor’ll do him just fine, except he doesn’t have that either, and Steve is  _ still. Talking. _

“The way you’re clenching around that plug,” he’s saying. Twist. Tug. “Like you can’t stand to let it go. Is that… what? Habit?” Steve moves the plug in a slow, canting ellipse, then gives another, firmer tug. “Or do you just need it that badly?”

Tony clenches his teeth and forces himself to relax his muscles. The plug comes free with a horrible, squelching pop. His hole twitches and flutters around the sudden absence.

Steve gives a grunt of satisfaction and sets about detaching the plug from the rings constricting Tony’s genitals. He reaches across Tony to set the plug on the nightstand and Tony forces himself not to cringe away. Steve pulls back. Resettles himself on the mattress.

Shoves two fingers into Tony, fast and brutal.

A raw gasp of pain breaks loose from Tony’s throat. Steve’s fingers are huge; with only the lube leftover from the plug to ease their passage, the  _ sickwrong  _ stretch sends another wave of heat and dizziness through him. His vision has gone muddled, greying at the edges.

Steve fucks his fingers in and out of Tony a few times, almost aimlessly, as if simply to prove—to Tony? to himself?—that he can. Tony stares at the ceiling and struggles to breathe and reminds himself that this is  _ nothing.  _

Steve pulls his fingers free. There’s the click of a bottle and then something slimy and cool spurts onto Tony’s perineum, dripping down towards his entrance. It keeps going, more lube than can possibly be necessary, oozing down his crack, pooling on the pillow beneath him. Another click, followed by the sound of the bottle being set aside, and then Steve begins to push the lube into Tony’s hole. 

He’s slower this time, more deliberate, scooping up globs of lubricant and feeding it inside him. The lube eases the friction, makes the stretch easier to bear but the sounds…

The sounds are obscene.

Squelch, slick, squish and suck, in and out, in and out as Tony grinds his teeth. Steve’s fingers pause, two knuckles deep in Tony’s ass, and begin to scissor, working Tony wider and wider still as the lube inside him pops and gurgles wetly.

Tony arches his neck, shoving his skull down into the mattress and tries to go somewhere else in his head, but the fading buzz of the alcohol and the jittering need for more clash and crash and force him back into his body, down to where thick fingers are slowly, methodically turning him inside out.

Part of him keeps saying that all he has to do is endure, and another part wants to know why, why is this happening, why did he agree to this, why the hell _ should he— _ and then Steve starts talking again and he remembers _. _

“You know,” Steve says, and his voice might sound almost conversational to someone who didn’t know him, someone who couldn’t hear the deep seam of rot underlying every syllable, “I’ve been wondering how this all started.”

How it  _ started? _ Steve knows how it started. With Indries, with Stane, or before that, with the ambassador and Justin Hammer, or maybe even— _ ice clinking in a crystal tumblr, “Isn’t he a little young for that, Stark?” “He’s my son, isn’t he? He can take it.” _

Maybe even further still.

_ “That’s it, small sips. You’re a man now, Anthony. How does it feel?” _

He doesn’t want to think about these things. He thinks not wanting to think about these things is what led him here; he thinks he ought to be able to have that, that oblivion, surely,  _ surely. _ With everything he’s sacrificed for it surely it’s only fair—

“Not the drinking,” Steve says, as if reading Tony’s mind. He sounds almost dismissive, which can’t be right. Steve hates his drinking.  _ “This.” _

Tony tilts his gaze down in time to see Steve gesture vaguely, taking in the room, the crummy bathroom, the bed,  _ Tony, _ and Tony understands.

Steve means the hooking. 

Steve wants to talk about the hooking.

Steve’s fingers had stilled, but now they pick up pace again. Steve’s stopped trying to fill Tony with lube, leaving the remnants to smear themselves over his tailbone and lower back (lube on his thighs, dried come on his face, filthy, filthy, filthy). Now Steve’s just working on fucking him open, pressing deep, stretching wide. 

“How did it go, Tony? You were, what? Sitting in an alley one evening, you and your bottle; some sleaze comes walking past and thinks to himself, this one looks desperate. This one looks like he’d do anything for a buck. Guess he was right, wasn’t he, Tony? Because here you are.”

At least Steve doesn’t seem to expect Tony to contribute to the conversation.

He wonders what Steve would say if Tony told him he doesn’t remember how it started. Told him how he got blackout drunk one night and woke up to the manager of some seedy motel banging on the door telling him to pay up or get out, to a handful of crumpled twenties on the nightstand, to a taste in his mouth and a soreness deep inside that left no doubt as to what he’d been doing.

“Or did you work it out for yourself? I bet you did. You’ve always been clever. An opportunist. You must’ve seen the hustlers in Times Square and thought to yourself, ‘I could do that.’ That must’ve been such a relief for you. Finding something you hadn’t sold yet.”

_ Stop, _ thinks Tony,  _ stop, stop— _

“A warm mouth. A tight hole. And it really is tight, Tony. I’ve seen virgins easier than you.”

“Th-thought you’d appreciate the challenge,” Tony mumbles.

Steve rolls right on as if he didn’t speak. Or… maybe not. Maybe that’s why he chooses that moment to start working a third finger into Tony. Tony’s eyes roll backwards in his head and he forces himself to bear down before Steve’s thick fingers tear him apart. And they could so easily tear him, given Steve’s size, his strength.  _ No permanent damage, _ Tony thinks, a drowning man grasping at straws.  _ Please, please. _

Certainly he’s in no shape to reply as Steve continues.

“It really is,  _ ungh.” _ A grunt of exertion. “Really is remarkable, considering how much you must take. But then, you’ve always been exceptional.”

He thrusts in hard, fucking Tony on the stiffened blades of his fingers, and Tony is helpless to do anything except jerk and bounce with the movement, landing on his bound arms again and again. 

“For all I know, you were already planning this back at the flophouse. That why you ran off like that? Had a customer waiting?”

“Dozens,” Tony wheezes. “Didn’t you notice? They were lining up around the blo— _ ahhh.” _ His voice gives way to a whimper as Steve thrusts all three fingers in to the hilt and starts prying him open with more than human strength. 

A knuckle brushes against Tony’s prostate. Tony jerks, nerves lighting up like live wires, and prays that Steve didn’t notice. He doesn’t want this to feel good.

But whoever is charged with answering Tony’s prayers hasn’t answered in a long time, and Steve’s fingers come back to rub with cruel and unerring accuracy at that small cluster of nerves. Tony twitches and thrashes in his bonds like a landed fish, trembling until he feels halfway to shaking himself apart.

“You could come like this, couldn’t you?” Steve murmurs. There’s a shimmery kind of surprise in his voice that falls over Tony’s skin like a fine silver mesh. As if maybe, just for one moment, Steve has forgotten to hate him. “I bet you could. And _ —  _ And maybe you will, later. But not now.” 

He pulls back and Tony really should know better to feel relief, because the next moment Steve is shoving back in again, in and out, in and out, steady as a piston and just as unyielding.

“No,” Steve continues, “I think you can’t have been doing this all that long. Not and still be as sensitive as you are. And as tight. You must be coining money down on that street corner.”

Tony doesn’t understand why Steve is so hung up on this, but. Well. Everyone has their kinks. He doesn’t know why he thought Steve would be different.  _ Just another john, _ he reminds himself,  _ he’s just another john. _

“Y-you gonna fuck me?” he gets out. “Or are you just here for the conversation?”

Steve stills. He sucks in a long breath, and when he speaks, his voice is taut with satisfaction. Steve has been waiting, Tony realizes, for him to ask.

“Did you think that was what this is about?”

_ Yes _ , Tony thinks, stomach a tight knot of foreboding. Yes, of course, yes, because that’s what Tony is, that’s what Tony is for—

“I’m not going to fuck you,” Steve says, and despite everything that’s passed between them and everything that’s still to come, Tony flinches at the sound of the obscenity on Steve’s lips. “At least, not yet.”

Steve shifts his fingers inside Tony, making him gasp. A fourth finger comes to tap at the straining edge of Tony’s entrance, and  _ no, _ Tony thinks,  _ no, I can’t— _

Steve leans forward, voice low, as if confiding a secret. “I’m going to  _ depreciate you,” _ and Tony’s mind goes blank.

“At least,” Steve continues, “I think that’s the right term. You’ve always been better with that sort of thing. But the way I see it is, all of this, everything is possible because you still have a _ — _ a  _ saleable commodity.” _ He spits the words out like a bad taste. “Something with value. I wonder what happens _ — _ ” Three fingers ram into Tony all at once. Pull out. Ram in again. Steve’s pinky still rests on his sore, thin-stretched rim, the worst kind of promise. “ _ — _ when I take that value away.”

* * *

Tony’s body is a mess of sensation, radiating up from the point of penetration, traveling through the lines Steve has bound around his body, a network of pain and weariness and hideous, tooth-grinding pleasure. His wrists hurt, his balls are tight, his cock is throbbing. His mind…

His mind is chaos, hot and swirling. The origin of the universe, or its dissolution.

“Stretch you out until you’re wide and loose and gaping,” Steve is saying, and his words whirl through Tony, twisting and distorting like images in a funhouse mirror. “Broken down and used. I wonder—”

Tony bucks off the bed, lips parting in a barely-stifled scream as Steve jabs his fingers into Tony’s prostate.

“I wonder how much they’ll pay for you then.”

Tony pants and wheezes and tries to focus, through the pain, through the overwhelming, unrelenting  _ feeling _ . There’s something important here, he has to— to pay attention to what Steve is saying, to what it means (not to how it feels, not, not, he is so very tired of feeling).

Steve…

Steve wants to ruin him, that’s plain enough. To take away his ability to earn money, or— No. To take away his  _ value. _

Tony thinks maybe he’s a little late for that.

He pushes down the visceral, gut-churning horror of the idea, of being used like that, broken down and remade, of Steve reshaping Tony’s body to suit his purposes—pushes down the errant sparks of lust kindling in some deep down part of his mind, a part of him that should have died a very long time ago.

What Steve is proposing… It’s only a temporary thing. Tony will recover from this. Unless Steve does actually manage to tear him but that… doesn’t seem to be the goal so he puts the thought aside. At most a week or so of soreness. Of being less of a stellar fuck than usual. He doubts it’ll make much of a difference. Most of his johns aren’t choosy enough to care.

Worst comes to worst, he’s still got his hands. His mouth and his throat. He can get by for a few weeks on back-alley suckjobs.

Too late Tony realizes he must’ve been speaking at least some of his thoughts aloud, because:

“I could break your teeth,” Steve growls. “Who’d pay you to suck them off then?”

Everything freezes. 

Steve yanks himself away from Tony as if he’s been burned, almost tumbling off the edge of the bed in his haste to get away.

“Oh god.” Steve’s voice is small, distant and echoey, like it’s sounding from the bottom of a well. “Tony, I didn’t mean that, I—”

“I—” Tony begins, and is vaguely surprised to realize he’s struggling for air. “You— We agreed. You said—”

“I didn’t mean it,” Steve says, low and desperate. “I was angry, god, Tony,  _ Tony _ ,  _ look _ at me—”

Tony raises his head to see Steve kneeling on the opposite end of the bed, hands on his knees clasped into fists, white-knuckled and shaking. The darkness of the room has bled the color from his eyes, but it can’t hide their anguish.

“I wouldn’t,” Steve whispers. “I’d never hurt you like that, you have to know I would never—” and Tony can’t take this, he can’t  _ take _ this, he can’t think with Steve looking at him like that, sounding like that, like he’s weak, like he’s wounded, like he’s sorry—

There is no room inside him for any pain except his own. Doesn’t Steve understand that? Even his own pain is too much without the aid of his favorite anesthetic.

Oh, he tried, god knows he tried, to carry other people’s pain, to bear their burdens alongside his own, to be a good man—a hero. He tried and it  _ broke him. _

Why can’t Steve just let him be broken?

He turns his face into his shoulder and shuts his eyes. “You said, nothing permanent.”

“I know,” Steve croaks, “I know I said that, I— god, just look at me, Tony,  _ please _ —”

Tony feels him shifting on the bed, feels the displacement of air as Steve reaches out a hand, feels it hovering just above his skin.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Steve touches him like that, in tenderness, in supplication. He thinks he might shatter. He thinks he might scream.

He thinks he knows what to say to get Steve to stop.

He draws in a long breath.

“And,” Tony continues, “you said that for everything else there’d be compensation.”

He fancies he can feel the air in the room turn colder. He hears Steve’s hand drop to his side.

“That’s right,” Steve says, slowly. “I did say that, didn’t I?” He huffs out something that might, with great generosity, be called a laugh. “Don’t worry. I won’t break my word. Nothing permanent. Nothing that lasts. Full—” He breaks off, chokes out the next word.  _ “Compensation.”  _ Another pause. “As long as you hold up your end of the bargain, anyway.”

A cold chill shoots down Tony’s spine as Steve’s four fingers come to rest lightly on his entrance.

“You were right,” Steve says. “Nothing I do to you will last. I know that. But for right now?”

He bends down to kiss the base of Tony’s cock, a gentle, featherlight gesture with nothing at all of tenderness in it.

“Right now, you’re mine.”

When he thrusts home this time, Tony really does scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was gonna save this and edit it some more, but then I was tired, so I just posted it. Last chapter DOES need some edits though, but I'm hoping to have it up by Wednesday at the latest. <3 Comments and kudos are love!


	4. Chapter 4

“I wish you could see yourself,” Steve whispers, some immeasurable amount of time later.

Tony’s eyes are wet, although he doesn’t remember how they got that way. His throat is raw, his mouth dry and gummy. A thin crust of spittle draws a line from the corner of his lips down to his chin, cutting across the remnants of Steve’s come. As for the rest of his body… He doesn’t have words for the way his body feels right now. He’s not sure the words have been invented.

He tries to let his mind sink away again, to that hollow black space beyond thought that pain and pleasure have carved out for him, but Steve’s voice cuts through everything, inescapable.

“Four fingers. It was tough, but we got there in the end, didn’t we?”

He might’ve been talking about an Avengers mission gone mildly awry.

Steve is stroking Tony’s knee as with his other hand, he probes at Tony’s aching passage. Tony is keenly aware of just how empty he is, of the cavernous space Steve has so industriously opened up inside him.

“You took it so well,” Steve croons, and Tony shudders, remembering a time when Steve’s praise meant the world to him. “And just look at you now. All loose and pliant. _Well used._ I wish I’d brought a camera so I could show you.”

A regular Kodak moment, Tony thinks dully. Not that he needs the visual. He can feel it, every exposed, throbbing inch. The air of the room is cold against parts of him that have scarcely felt the air before.

“You should look like this all the time,” Steve is murmuring, low and fervent. “You—”

He breaks off abruptly, but Tony knows better than to confuse it for a genuine reprieve.

“I bet I could fit my whole hand inside you,” Steve says, and there it is, that anger again, that hard note of challenge. “It wouldn’t take that much more work. Especially not for you. All you’d have to do is lie there and take it.” Then, anger curdling to bitterness in his voice: “You should be good at that by now.”

Steve’s hands on Tony’s body still, and then withdraw.

“Then again,” Steve continues, as if to himself, “if I am going to—to _fuck_ you,” and the word still sounds like a foreign object in Steve’s mouth, “then I guess there’s not much point in waiting, is there?”

Tony says nothing. He doesn’t think Steve really expects a reply.

Steve lets out a puff of mirthless laughter. The mattress creaks as he stands. Then, without another word, he turns and walks off towards the bathroom. Tony hears the creak of the door, the faint buzz of fluorescent lights coming to life, the soft rushing of the tap.

He turns his thoughts inwards and tries to focus on his own breathing, to smooth out the hitch that seems to have developed there. In and out. In and out. Don’t think of the pain, or the humiliation. Don’t think about the lube still leaking out of him, slick against his cheeks and thighs, cooling in the night air. Don’t think about whatever Steve has planned for him.

He’s never been much good at not thinking about things. He’s always needed extra help _—light glinting amber, refracted through a bottle—the brushfire burn of whiskey down his throat—_

_I bet I could fit my whole hand in—_

And now his heart is going like a jackhammer, Jesus.

 _I bet I could_ —

No, don’t think about it, don’t think. It’s not like thinking’s going to change anything. Just breathe, in and out, in and out until the world _(please)_ begins to fall away. Just breathe— _All you’d have to do is—_ just breathe— _lie there and take it. You should be—_ just breathe _—good at that by—_ just—

“Right where I left you, huh? Makes a nice change.”

Tony’s eyelids flutter open.

Steve is standing over him.

He jerks his head. “Up.”

Tony has just enough time for a pulse of confusion—he’s still tied up; how exactly is he supposed to—before Steve’s hands are on him, knotting in the rope harness at Tony’s chest, sliding beneath his back in a half-embrace.

Steve manhandles Tony into a half-upright position, more gently than Tony could have expected, until Tony’s head and back are curled against the headboard. Steve pulls away.

A glass appears in front of Tony’s face. Tony’s heart skips a beat. Surely Steve hasn’t—

“It’s water,” Steve says brusquely. “Drink.”

Water. Of course. That… makes a lot more sense and at the same time, no sense at all. Just minutes ago Steve was threatening to stick his entire fist up Tony’s ass, and now he’s bringing him water?

He doesn’t understand it but he’s thirsty enough not to care. He tilts his head forward as Steve raises the glass to meet his lips.

Tony drinks greedily, gulping the water down so fast that Steve twice pulls the glass away.

“Easy,” he admonishes. “There’s more if you need it,” and that doesn’t fit either, but Tony sets it aside for now.

He finishes draining the glass and lets out a long, shuddering sigh.

“Another?” Steve asks.

Tony considers the question. The edge is off his thirst now, and there are practical considerations. He doesn’t know how long it’ll be until the next lull. He imagines asking for a bathroom break in the middle of whatever the hell it is Steve has planned for him, and flushes with a preemptive shame.

Anyway, he wants it done with, this… this pretense of care. He just wants to get on with things. The sooner they do that, the sooner this is all over.

He shakes his head, not looking at Steve.

“You—”

Tony can hear the frown in Steve’s voice. But whatever he was about to say, he must think better of it. There’s a quiet thunk as Steve sets the glass on the bedside table.

“I’m going to—” he says, and then, in lieu of explanation, takes Tony by the shoulders and tilts him forward until his back is exposed. He runs his hands over the bindings—making sure they haven’t given way, Tony supposes. No worries there. Even at his peak, Tony doesn’t think he could’ve broken out of these bonds, much less after weeks of sleeping rough and drinking his dinner.

“Wiggle your fingers.”

Tony blinks.

“I said—”

Tony gives his fingers a desultory waggle.

Steve breathes out.

He eases Tony onto his back again and proceeds to untie his legs, folding and unfolding Tony’s joints, chafing at the spots where the ropes bit into Tony’s flesh. At Steve’s behest, Tony wiggles his toes—demonstrating, he realizes, that there’s no nerve damage or loss of circulation.

It’s not care after all. Not really. It’s just Steve holding to his end of the bargain.

Except…

Except that doesn’t explain the way Steve strokes a hand lingeringly down Tony’s thigh. The way his thumb sweeps a caress over the bony jut of Tony’s ankle.

A sudden swell of emotion rises in him, prickling at the backs of his eyes, clenching in his throat, and he turns his face into his shoulder. He didn’t ask for this, this intermittent, uncertain kindness. He thinks he would’ve preferred cruelty. Yes. A nice, easy consistent cruelty. At least then he would’ve known what to expect.

Steve gives Tony’s leg one last caress, then steps back from the bed.

Tony waits for the ax to drop.

He hears Steve moving away—presumably to get something else from his little bag of horrors, some new humiliation for Tony to bear— _don’t think about it_ —

He hears the swish and rattle of the curtains being drawn.

He cracks open an eye.

Steve is standing at the window, staring out at whatever dismal scene of Lower Manhattan nightlife presents itself to him. Tony strains his ears for the sound of… something, some disturbance, maybe, that’s caught Steve’s eye, but hears nothing. The city, for once, is silent.

“It’s cold,” Steve says.

It’s a moment before the statement sinks in, the inanity of it. Steve wants to talk about the weather?

“I always did hate the cold. Growing up… You feel it worse when you’re skinny. No real insulation. Cuts right through to the bone, and never mind what you wear.” There’s a low, almost hypnotic quality to his voice that seems to hook just beneath Tony’s skin, drawing him in in spite of himself. “And then, after the ice… Some days, I thought I’d never be warm again. I used to keep the thermostat in my room cranked all the way up—must’ve cost a fortune in heating bills, not that you ever said anything.”

Tony doesn’t think he noticed that, about the heating. Certainly he wouldn’t have noticed the cost. He feels a distant, echoing kind of guilt. Surely there was something he could have done, if only he’d noticed. Built a sauna attachment to the gym. Designed the world’s best electric blanket. _Something._

Steve’s voice drops even lower, so that Tony has to strain to hear. “I don’t know if I told you, at the time, how grateful I was. For the room. For the Avengers. For everything you gave me.”

The protest that rises in Tony is reflexive. _I didn’t—_

“In fact, I know I didn’t. Too… caught up in other things. All the things I’d lost.” A soft exhalation of air, too gentle to be called a snort. “I probably wasn’t much in the way of company, back then.”

 _You were perfect_ , Tony thinks, and that—

That is a thought that doesn’t belong here. It rings with the conviction of another time, another place. Another Tony. He tries to quash it but how do you silence a ghost?

“But I was, you know. Even if I didn’t say it. So—so _damn_ grateful, and I—”

That strange, other Tony is so close to the surface now, that him-from-another-life. As if he’s been called forth by Steve’s words, and Tony can remember, just for a moment, what it felt like, to be that man. A man with a name. A man with friends. A man with a future.

A hero.

“I just wanted to tell you that.”

There’s a desperate, yearning jumble in Tony’s mind, because he knows this isn’t real, knows the world Steve is speaking of is gone, lost to him forever , and yet he can hear that other self in his mind, urging him to speak, to answer, to say— Something. _Anything_. To say—

To say—

“I’m going to fuck you now,” Steve says into the silent room. The hard _k_ clicks into place like the hammer of a gun.

Tony breathes out all at once, a lung-emptying, gut-punch of an exhale.

He can feel that second self draining away from him. Bleeding out. A second, swifter death for the Tony-Stark-that-was. You’d think dying would be like everything else. You’d think it would get easier with practice.

“What?” Steve adds, and his voice has transformed into something cold, hard, utterly unyielding. An irony there: whatever name Tony may once have called himself, Steve’s always been the one with iron at his core. “Nothing to say?”

Tony lets his eyes drift out of focus and tries to fall away into his body once again, to lose himself among the aches and the hurts. This was always going to happen. He can almost bear it if he thinks of it that way, as something inevitable.

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me how much you want it? How much you need it? How you’ve been dying to have it?”

Steve crosses the room and grabs Tony by the chin, fingers bruisingly tight, jerking him upwards.

“I’m talking to you,” he grinds out, and Tony blinks a slow acknowledgement.

“Aren’t you going to thank me,” Steve asks, “for giving it to you?”

He releases Tony’s chin but doesn’t move back. His gaze seems to bore right through into Tony’s skull, a hot, blunted pain, like the beginnings of migraine.

Tony opens his mouth, working his jaw carefully from side to side. He darts out a tongue, touching it to cracked lips. He forces himself to meet Steve’s eyes.

He is so very tired. The weariness of ages come upon him all at once.

“What do you want from me?” he asks, and Steve goes still.

“What do I want?” he echoes. “What do I _want?”_ and his voice is shaking, rising on a sudden pitch of emotion. “I want my friend back, I want my _partner_ , I want—”

He breaks off abruptly, twisting away as though he can’t bear to look at Tony for a moment longer. One hand comes down with a thump, landing open-handed on the wall. He leans into it, shoulders heaving. His eyes are screwed tight.

Tony breathes in. Breathes out. Breathes in again, slow and deep as he can manage. Then he lifts his head, looking Steve full in the face.

“You know what I think?”

Steve opens his eyes. His gaze flickers over to meet Tony’s. He huffs out a laugh and runs a hand across his face.

“I have never,” he says, and there’s something wry in his voice, something so damn familiar that it’s all Tony can do not to look away again, “not once in my life, known what you think.”

Tony takes this in. Sits with it. Examines its angles and implications.

Lets it go.

“I think you’re full of shit,” he says, and Steve rears back as if he’s been slapped.

“I don’t think,” Tony presses on, “you care about that at all,” and even as he’s saying the words he’s not sure he believes them, but he knows there’s something going on here—something more than punishment and a hell of a lot more than some twisted shot at redemption, and he is suddenly, painfully sick of lying here and taking his beating. Of going down and staying down without a fight. “I think you just wanted something to work over.”

Steve’s breathing has picked up speed. “And if I did?” he demands. “I’d have come to the right place, wouldn’t I, Tony? That’s what you are, these days. That’s what you’ve _made yourself_ —something to work over.”

Tony sinks back into the mattress again. His lips turn upwards in something like a smile.

“Sure,” he agrees, easy, like it means nothing, like all of this has a price he knows how to pay. “But let’s stop pretending this is about anything other than you getting your rocks off. You don’t want to help me. You want to use me.” He draws in a shuddering breath before he says it, his last, best weapon. “Just. Like everybody. Else.”

There’s a moment of utter stillness. Then Tony gasps in pain as a hand seizes in the harness at his chest, hauling him upwards so the ropes dig into his back. He’s sure this will bruise. A part of him welcomes it.

Steve shakes him once, firmly, and Tony gasps again.

“No,” Steve says, and his voice is a shattered window, a mess of splinters and knife-sharp points. “I really don’t think you get to talk right now.”

He releases the ropes and Tony drops backwards into the bed, head bouncing where it hits the mattress.

A moment later Steve is back, nudging at Tony’s face.

“Open.”

Tony doesn’t respond straightaway and Steve grabs him by the jaw, prying his mouth open. He presses something into Tony’s face, and for a moment, all Tony can smell is sweat and musk and other soured, animal odors. And then the thing is inside his mouth, and Tony realizes what it is.

Steve has—

Steve has _gagged_ him—

Steve has gagged him with his own filthy briefs.

The realization opens a great pit inside of him, carves it out of him like a wound. Humiliation is too small a word for the way this feels.

“Can you breathe?”

When Tony doesn’t respond, Steve slaps him on the cheek.

“Can you. _Breathe?”_

Tony nods. It seems to take the very last of his strength.

“Good.”

Steve slaps him once more, apparently just because he can. Then he grabs Tony and flips him over onto his stomach, pushing his knees forward until his ass is in the air. He settles himself behind him on the bed. Tony shuts his eyes at the sound of a zipper coming undone.

“Ready?”

Tony says nothing. His mouth is full, his face mashed into the coverlet, but even if it wasn’t, what would there be to say?

“Well,” Steve says, “I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

And then Steve is grabbing him roughly the hips and pulling him backwards, and then there’s a blunt pressure at the entrance to Tony’s body. Steve lets out a groan, long and low, and then he’s pushing forward, and then, and then—

* * *

To the limited extent that he’s allowed himself to speculate, Tony imagined this part would be easier. Substantial as it is, Steve’s dick is still less capable of inflicting punishment than all four of his fingers, and as for the act itself, well… At least it’ll finally be something Tony is used to. He’s gotten quite adept, over the past weeks, at letting his mind fade out while his customers heave and thrust and take their pleasure inside of him.

He thinks now, gasping around the fabric filling his mouth as his cheek ploughs into the mattress, that he had no idea.

Because it’s not just another customer. It’s _Steve_. Steve huffing and panting above him, Steve dripping sweat onto his back, Steve groaning into Tony’s ear as he drives the bed back into the wall, again, again, again. There’s no escape, no way to hide from this, from what he’s doing, from who he’s doing it with. Each thrust of Steve’s cock inside him screams against his sore and sensitized nerves, and it feels like being turned inside out. Like being taken apart from within. Steve is everywhere, so deep inside him that Tony can practically taste it, filling every hollow and crevice in Tony’s broken-down body until every breath that rasps through his lungs is Steve, every stuttering beat of his heart.

Steve’s angle changes slightly, so he’s shoving right past Tony’s prostate. Tony’s bound and swollen cock twitches helplessly at each successive punch of blue-black pleasure, because even pleasure is punishment now, and every kindness a cruelty.

Steve doesn’t seem to be too concerned about kindness. His hands grip Tony’s hips with bruising force as he crams himself into Tony over and over. The rocking motion of the fucking is making Tony kind of seasick, and he realizes that if he throws up with the gag in his mouth, he’s probably going to choke on his vomit. He won’t be able to help it. He could die like this, right here, tonight, with Steve’s cock in his ass.

Once upon a time he wouldn’t have thought of that as a bad way to go.

Steve snaps his hips three times in quick succession, and Tony’s mind tumbles sideways into a haze of pain. By the time he’s managed to claw his way back to awareness, Steve has stopped moving. He’s just barely inside Tony now, pulled almost all of the way out, hands still locked around Tony’s hips, holding him in place.

Tony bites down on the mess of foul-tasting cloth inside his mouth, trying not to tense in anticipation of Steve’s next thrust. If he clenches up, it’ll hurt more. The pleasure will be keener. It’ll feel… _more_ , and it’s already so much, so _much_ —

When the next blow comes, it isn’t the one Tony is expecting.

“Do you know,” Steve asks, and his voice is deep, rough, elemental, the shifting of rocks before a fall, “how often I’ve thought about this?”

He punctuates the question with a thrust, his cock scraping over Tony’s prostate. Tony’s eyes roll back into his head at the blare of sensation, screeching across his nerves like feedback over a loudspeaker. It drowns out everything, even Steve’s words, and Tony can almost convince himself, as he gasps and wheezes, that he imagined them. A lie from one of his most furtive fantasies, too fantastic, too longed-for ever to have a place in reality. It can’t be real. Least of all here. Least of all now, of all times, of all places.

Steve holds Tony’s ass to him, flush against his groin. He’s only pulled out an inch or so before he’s pushing back in, as if to be outside of Tony by even that much is more than he can bear.

“I used,” Steve pants, “to picture it,” and Tony didn’t imagine this, Tony didn’t imagine this at all. “We’d be… _ungh,_ sparring, maybe, and then afterwards, in the showers, I’d take a step closer and you’d look at me like—like all that time you’d been waiting for it, for me to take that step, and—”

Tony’s mind races and stumbles, trying desperately to keep ahead of Steve’s words, because he knows if he trips—if he falls the words will keep right on coming and he’ll be buried underneath.

Okay. So… So Steve’s attracted to him. _Was_ attracted to him. Tony guesses he already knew that. It’s not like Steve could’ve gotten it up otherwise. He breathes in through his nose, tries to ignore the shifting pressure of Steve moving inside him, and tells himself it doesn’t mean anything. It _can’t_ mean anything. It’s all in the past now anyway. More history between them, sloughed off like old skin cells, desiccated and dead. Dust returned to dust.

“I’d hear you in the hallway outside my room, late at night—you always kept such godawful hours—and I’d wonder what would happen if I opened the door and invited you inside.”

Tony can picture it so clearly— _the door swinging open, the light of the hallway glinting golden against Steve’s tousled hair, Steve’s smile of invitation, hesitant at first then growing bolder_ and Tony doesn’t want— He doesn’t want to hear this, doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want to think about it. This, between them—it’s supposed to be dead. Drowned dead and gone. Tony held it beneath the water himself, felt it thrash, felt it _die_.

How can something dead hurt so much?

Steve is still rocking into him, aimless and urgent, keeping time with his words.

“Or maybe one day, we’d be sitting in the quinjet after a mission, and you’d turn to me and smile, and I’d take your hand and—”

No, no, no, Tony can’t take this, he can’t _take this_. He wants to block out the sound but his hands are still bound behind his back with ropes that refuse to give.

“We wouldn’t do anything. We wouldn’t _say_ anything, but we’d know. That as soon as we got back to the mansion, as soon as the other Avengers left, we’d—”

Tony makes some desperate sound of protest, choked off and muted by the gag but it must work because Steve stops dead. Stops talking. Stops _moving._ He doesn’t pull out but Tony feels him haul himself upright, so he’s no longer hunching close over Tony but poised above him.

“And look at us now,” Steve murmurs, and there’s that taut note back in his voice again, like a rubber band stretched to the point of breaking. “Look at us now.”

One of his hands pulls back. Steve is holding Tony up one-handed now, like Tony weighs nothing at all. Tony hears him shift, hears the soft whispering drag of skin moving over skin. When Steve’s hand returns to his hip, it’s wet to the touch.

Sweat. It’s got to be sweat. The alternative is beyond considering.

“Maybe you’re right,” Steve whispers. “Maybe I do want to wreck you.”

The confession settles in Tony’s ears like the deafness after an explosion, the bomb dropped, the trigger pulled, blotting out the world with a noise so great it sounds like silence.

 _to wreck you_ —Steve’s words tremoring through the stillness— _maybe I do_

_maybe I do want_

_I want to wreck you_

“But why shouldn’t I?” Steve adds in a hiss, fingers digging in so viciously that Tony feels like he’s one fraction away from being torn apart. “It’s only fair.” His voice is climbing now. “It seems like everyone’s had a chance except me.”

He starts moving again. Tony hears him sniff as he inhales; his sigh is a gurgle, and when something wet splashes once more onto his back Tony can no longer deny the evidence of his senses.

Steve is crying.

Steve is fucking him, and Steve is crying, and for the first time in all of these miserable godforsaken weeks Tony truly wants to die.

Surely death would be a small price to pay, to be free of this.

“I could stand it,” Steve chokes out, “when it was Bethany. When it was Jan. When it was someone you cared about, who—who cared about you. Someone you _chose_ _._ But then— Then you go and do _this.”_

He’s fucking into Tony harder now and it’s impossible, it’s too much, Tony can’t bear this and he doesn’t have a choice not to, the things Steve is saying, the way he _sounds—_

“You go and give yourself to _strangers_ on the _street_. You let them put their hands on you. You let them use you. You let them degrade you, you let them _own you_.” His voice cracks. “Why not me, Tony? Why not me?”

Oh.

Oh god.

Steve loves him.

Steve is in love with him and it changes. _Nothing_.

It’s too late for them. Maybe it always was.

Too late from the day his father first put a glass of scotch into his hand.

Too late from the day he was born and came out wrong. Weak. Wanting. Fatally flawed.

Steve reaches underneath Tony, down to the rings that still constrict him and Tony’s heart goes wild with terror. It feels for a moment like Steve is just going to yank them right off him, but then there’s a sound and the plastic crumbles under the pressure of Steve’s fingers and Tony is free. His cock slaps his stomach. Steve swipes his hand through the excess lube still smeared across Tony’s thighs, then reaches up to wrap around Tony’s shaft and Tony is unable to choke back a sob. Steve is touching him. Steve loves him and Steve is _touching_ him, with a roughness that stays for once just on the right side of pleasure.

“You’re going to come,” Steve rasps above him. It’s not even a command. Just a statement of fact. Inarguable.

Tony wishes he could argue. He doesn’t want to want this, but he doesn’t know how not to. There are some things that just run too deep. Some cancers that can’t be cut out without killing the patient outright. Steve has metastasized, in his heart, in his liver, in his lungs, and he can numb the pain but he’ll _never be free of this—_

Steve flicks his thumb across Tony’s slit. Tony gives a muffled cry and bucks his hips, unsure whether he’s chasing the sensation or trying to flee it.

“You’re going to come for me,” Steve says again, “and you’re going to say my name when you do it.”

He releases Tony’s cock. Tony is just pathetic enough to let out a moan of disappointment. The shame of it spirals through him, tarnishing and corroding the brightness of sensation of Steve inside him. Steve’s hand is on his jaw, forcing his mouth open, tugging at Tony’s briefs, and Tony does his best to spit them out, gasping and gagging at the taste of clean, unfiltered air.

Now Steve is touching his cock again. He thrusts in hard, knocking Tony’s hips forward so he thrusts into the slick friction of Steve’s hand and it feels so good there are no words to describe it. He’s pinioned, hemmed in on both sides; Steve is everywhere he turns and it’s everything he ever wanted and everything he damn near killed himself to escape. He’s going to come soon, he’s so damn close, and he wants it and he fears it in a way he can hardly remember wanting or fearing anything in so long, so long.

“Say it,” Steve is demanding, “my name, Tony, _say_ _it!”_ and god help him, Tony _tries._ He tries but his lips won’t shape the word. There’s scarcely any air in his lungs to speak with anyway, and all that comes out is a weak and formless wail. Steve is fucking him and Steve is jerking him and it’s all too much and Tony is coming apart. Steve rams into his prostate and it feels like being effaced, unwritten, words flying off the page, everything he was and everything he is fast fading, fading, gone—

When he comes it’s like staring into the face of the sun, a perfect, searing blindness which chars his senses to ashes. He could drink himself into the grave and never find an oblivion as pure as this.

“God _damn_ you,” Tony hears, “god _damn_ you,” and very distantly he is aware of Steve thrusting in to the hilt, once, twice, thrice and hold as he shudders and cries out and spills himself deep inside.

An ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Decided to split the last chapter, so we've still got one short installment to go.


	5. Chapter 5

The spots have begun to fade from Tony’s eyes. The euphoria has gone, leaving him flat and cold. His mouth is sour, dry as cotton, the rag Steve used to gag him having soaked up every bit of available moisture.

Steve is slumped over him. The damp fall of his hair brushes against the back of Tony’s neck as he shifts, and then, gingerly, pulls out. His softening cock trails wetness onto the skin of Tony’s ass. He’s breathing heavily. At least it doesn’t sound like he’s crying anymore.

Steve sits up. He moves slowly, almost painfully, with none of his usual leonine grace, as if for once he feels every minute of those years in the ice.

Tony watches through one slit eyelid as Steve moves to get off the bed, stops, sits back down. He’s not looking at Tony. He’s staring down at his own hands as if hoping to read something there. He turns his wrists, palms open and outward; palms down, fingers curled. Abruptly he stops, hands coming to rest on his massive thighs. His fingers seize, then relax. It’s still several long moments before he speaks.

“I—”

His mouth works. Twists. A series of expressions chase across his face, too quick to follow. He brings up a hand to scrub at his mouth and turns away, shoulders hunching.

“I’m going to take a shower.” Tony is nearly certain that’s not what Steve intended to say. “Until I get back, I don’t want you to move a mus— I—” Command flickers and fizzles in his voice like a dying lightbulb. “Just… stay there.”

Where does Steve imagine he could go?

Steve gets up and is almost all the way out of the room when he stops. Bows his head. His shoulders are taut, drawn together. The old familiar signs. Steve is wrestling with something again.

“We would have done anything, you know?” he says at last. His head is turned, just barely. He’s not looking at Tony. “To help you. To keep you safe. But you were too damn proud to accept our help.”

He twists to look at Tony more fully now and even after everything Tony’s gut clenches at his expression, the deep-etched lines between Steve’s brows and at his mouth, sorrow carving ruin across his face. Then Steve’s lips twist and this— This is worse. Worse because perverse, worse because  _ twisted.  _ A gargoyle grimace on the face of a saint and all Tony’s doing.

Steve bares his teeth. “How’s that pride treating you these days?”

The bathroom door swings shut behind him. A minute or so later Tony hears the hiss of the shower starting up.

Something is leaking out of him, cold and viscous onto his thigh. He doesn’t have the strength to clench himself shut. He wonders vaguely how long it’ll be before his body recovers—how long he’ll have to carry this, this space Steve has hollowed out inside him, the emptiness where Steve was and now is not. The contours of his absence. 

He thinks it probably won’t be long.

His body hurts in a dozen different places, but distantly, as though pain and body both are things that belong to someone else. Someone else—or some _ when  _ else, and he finally recognizes the pain for what it is. He guesses he’s known it from the start, even if, for a little while, Steve almost made him forget.

It’s the ache of a phantom limb. A deed that can’t be undone. A loss that can never be regained.

Amputation.

It wasn’t even pride that made him run, that’s the thing. Cowardice, in large part, yes, but not only that. It was the last piece of goodness in him. He wanted to spare them. Rhodey. The Avengers.  _ Steve _ . To cut them loose before he could drag them down with him.

The magnitude of his failure stretches out before him, deep as the ocean and twice as wide. Tony shuts his eyes and finally, finally lets himself sink.

* * *

Steve emerges some time later, towel around his waist. The paucity of light can’t disguise the supranatural perfection of his body. He looks like every inch what he is: a man out of myth. A hero. Impossible to imagine that Tony once stood beside this man, fought beside him. Counted him an equal. A  _ friend _ . Impossible to believe he was ever someone Steve could have—could have lov—

But then, that wasn’t really him who did, who  _ was  _ those things. That man is dead. Tony is just… what’s left. A wretched, empty thing. Skin stretched tight over a hollow nest of bone. Steve could crush him with a touch.

The thought doesn’t frighten him the way it might have done, once.

He doesn’t turn to watch as Steve crosses over to the other side of the room. When Steve next enters his field of vision, he’s fully dressed. Tony notes with a flicker of surprise that he’s changed into a different outfit from the one he wore before. Some vague apprehension curls through him like smoke, but he says nothing. Doesn’t ask. Doesn’t examine his own reactions any more closely. Just lies there. Takes it all as it comes. He doesn't have it in him to do more than that. There's nothing left in him to give.  


Steve rolls up his sleeves, sits down on the bed—careful to avoid any stray wet patches—and proceeds to untie the ropes around Tony’s wrists. His fingers are brusque—not quite rough, but not gentle either. He undoes the harness next, rolling Tony onto his side to get at the knots on his chest.

He stands there, passing the rope through his hands, though surely the thing must be filthy with lube and come. Then he walks away again, to the far side of the room, then over to the bathroom (Tony hears the tap running), then back across the room. When Steve next comes to stand in front of him, he’s wearing a jacket, bag slung over one shoulder.

Tony’s insides twist in something more than mere confusion.

Steve stands there for a long moment, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He drags his gaze down Tony’s body, settling on Tony’s right ankle, which rests only a foot or so away from him on the bed. His hand twitches, as if he intended to reach out and restrained himself just in time. Steve jams the hand into his pocket instead and takes in a breath.

“Money’s on the bureau,” he says. “The room is rented through the next two days. Figured you might need some time to recover.”

Dimly, Tony registers the lie—wonders if Steve knows he’s been caught out. Wonders if he cares.

Steve never intended to leave this soon. He talked about—about doing other things, worse things—about putting his whole hand inside of Tony,  _ Christ _ . He rented the room for multiple nights. He brought a change of clothes…

Looks like he’s managed to drive Steve away after all. Game, set, and match; match point, Tony. A win for the record books.

“Well. It sure was something, seeing you. Guess I know who to call next time I’m on the lookout for a good time, huh?” Steve’s tone is black and jagged with disappointment.

The words rise up in Tony almost of their own volition, but they don’t come out easy, scraping against the bruise that is his throat. “Didn’t live up to your expectations?”

His voice sounds like a death rattle, a desiccated husk of a thing. A grotesquerie. A ruin.

Steve makes a little huffing noise. Under any other circumstance, it might have been a laugh. “I’m surprised you can still speak,” he says. “And I’ve been learning not to put too much stock in expectations.”

And that—that, more than anything else, sounds  _ wrong _ coming from Steve. Steve has always had hope—always, despite everything, been an optimist at his very core. Even tonight’s little game was about hope, in its own twisted way. What did Steve say? ‘I’m going to give you what you need to get past this?’

He really does taint everything he touches. Even Captain America.

He screws his eyes shut, pulls the corners of his mouth taut.

“Two days,” Steve repeats. “It’s already on the card, so—” He breaks off. “Anyway. Be seeing you, Tony.”

Tony stares at the darkness of his shut eyelids and listens to Steve’s footsteps receding.

The footsteps halt, then approach once more. There’s the sound of clothing rustling, the soft crinkle of paper.

“Almost forgot,” Steve says, and there is nothing in his voice that Tony recognizes. Nothing at all.

Tony gasps as something enters him, sharp edges shoving past his abused rim.

“Your tip,” Steve says.

The footsteps recede again.

The door opens, then closes.

Tony slowly, slowly reaches behind himself and pulls out four crisp fifty dollar bills from where they’ve been wedged in his ass. The edges are still tacky with come and lube, and—though it’s hard to tell in the half-light—something darker, something that might be blood. It’ll wash off, though. Tony is nearly sure of that. The bills are still good legal tender, as long as he cleans them soon.

He makes no attempt to move.

The bills crumple in his fist.

Turns out he was wrong. He does have something left in him to give after all.

Alone in the twilight of the empty hotel room, Tony begins to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I just want you to touch me,_   
>  _I imagine i would crumble, but so so slowly,_   
>  _it looks like history erasing itself. Like_   
>  _the coliseum falling into ruin. Yes, I do believe,_   
>  _if you touched me, I would be ruined._
> 
> Logan February, “[Sober II (Melodrama)](https://occulum.net/2018/01/31/sober-ii-melodrama-by-logan-february/)”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at my tumblr [here](http://whenas-in-silks.tumblr.com/post/180244812785/fic-like-history-erasing-itself) or at my Marvel-centric blog [here](http://sister-stark.tumblr.com/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art inspired by "like history erasing itself"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17062787) by [Hayluhalo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hayluhalo/pseuds/Hayluhalo)




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